The military are at it again in Honduras: Who is supporting them?

It is pretty depressing to see that a number of soldiers would have decided to arrest the elect president of Honduras Manuel Zelaya in the middle of the night and to expel him to Costa Rica. All this, it was said, in order to defend the constitution. It is a strange way to ‘defend’ the constitution by breaking it.

The military are clearly working against history by pretending a political return when nobody will recognise their illegal government. Their time in the 1960s, 70s and 80s is over and the return to democratic rule all over Latin America irreversible. Unless, that is, we let them return by giving the slightest bit of legitimacy to their actions.

This is exactly what seems to be happening from a number of sources. The first was Hilary Clinton, the US secretary of state, who ‘condemned’ the coup but pledged the US would not break diplomatic relations with the new government, thus giving a kind of green light to other such attempts throughout the continent.

We have to remember that the excuses used by the military in Honduras are very similar indeed to those used to justify the Venezuelan coup a few years ago and those used by the leaders of the ‘golpe civico prefectural’ here in Bolivia last September. Is there a link between them? Perhaps.

We have to hope that these declarations by the US secretary of state were a mistake provoked by the uncertainty of the first few hours after the coup. President Obama has condemned the new regime and will not recognise it so we would hope this is the last we hear from the US in tacit support of the coup.

Other sources of support are less surprising. The union of so called democratic organisations of America (UnoAmerica), a right wing network of organisations, formally recognised the new government referring to the coup as ‘a legitimate succession of power provoked by the president’s attempt to break the constitution and follow Venezuela’s path’.

What is more worrying is the position that seems to have been taken by CNN that has repeatedly referred to the coup as a ‘forced succession of power’. In what must be one of the worst blunders of all times on live TV, the news anchor joked about the deposed president’s pyjamas during an interview with the president of the Organisation of American States (OAS), Mr Insulza.

Neither the OAS, the Rio Group, nor ALBA have recognised the new dictatorship. They have all retired their ambassadors from the country. It is only to be expected that the European Union will make a clear and formal statement denouncing the return to one of the darkest moments of Latin America’s history.

Peru and Bolivian relations deteriorate

Both are Andean countries with large indigenous populations. Both are supposed to be part of the Andean community of nations. Unfortunately, that is where similarities end.

Peru and Bolivia have never seen eye to eye since the arrival to power of the first indigenous leader in the history of Bolivia. However, that relationship of brother nations has taken a turn for the worse since the violence that erupted in Peru last week that has left unconfirmed numbers of dead among policemen and indigenous protesters.

The Peruvian government has rejected Bolivian recriminations for the indiscriminate use of force and description of the killing of indigenous people as genocide. In addition, Peru has blamed the hand of 'foreign interests' in the protests that led to this bloody end, clearly pointing the finger at Bolivia and citing an 'ideological contagion' between the vibrant indigenous movement in Bolivia, and the increasing organisational strength of its own indigenous movements that object to the opening of vast tract of their land to the oil industry.

The differences are clearly great. The strength of the indigenous social movements in Bolivia is precisely a measure of the extent to which the country has moved on from the imported political models that have failed it in such a calamitous way since the arrival of democracy in 1982. Along with this system went the neoliberal economic logic that gave away the country's natural resources to the detriment of its people, making a poor country even poorer.

In Peru, by contrast, the neoliberal economic paradigm continues to be dominant in political circles even though a nascent indigenous movement opposes it from the bottom-up. It is a symptom of this grass-roots level opposition's relative weakness that the state can resort to repressive tactics while blaming the victims through a cynical media campaign that criminalises any form of peaceful protest.

We have seen all this before in Bolivia itself. During the 1990s, the coca growers of the Chapare region were criminalised for defending their way of life but would eventually lead a coalition of social movements that went on to become the current government. Their leader was called Evo Morales. Are we seeing in Peru the beginnings of a similar process?





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'We are fighting for our lives and our dignity'

Across the globe, as mining and oil firms race for dwindling resources, indigenous peoples are battling to defend their lands – often paying the ultimate price

o John Vidal
o The Guardian, Saturday 13 June 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/13/forests-environment-oil-companies


It has been called the world's second "oil war", but the only similarity between Iraq and events in the jungles of northern Peru over the last few weeks has been the mismatch of force. On one side have been the police armed with automatic weapons, teargas, helicopter gunships and armoured cars. On the other are several thousand Awajun and Wambis Indians, many of them in war paint and armed with bows and arrows and spears.

In some of the worst violence seen in Peru in 20 years, the Indians this week warned Latin America what could happen if companies are given free access to the Amazonian forests to exploit an estimated 6bn barrels of oil and take as much timber they like. After months of peaceful protests, the police were ordered to use force to remove a road bock near Bagua Grande.

In the fights that followed, at least 50 Indians and nine police officers were killed, with hundreds more wounded or arrested. The indigenous rights group Survival International described it as "Peru's Tiananmen Square".

"For thousands of years, we've run the Amazon forests," said Servando Puerta, one of the protest leaders. "This is genocide. They're killing us for defending our lives, our sovereignty, human dignity."

Yesterday, as riot police broke up more demonstrations in Lima and a curfew was imposed on many Peruvian Amazonian towns, President Garcia backed down in the face of condemnation of the massacre. He suspended – but only for three months – the laws that would allow the forest to be exploited. No one doubts the clashes will continue.

Peru is just one of many countries now in open conflict with its indigenous people over natural resources. Barely reported in the international press, there have been major protests around mines, oil, logging and mineral exploitation in Africa, Latin America, Asia and North America. Hydro electric dams, biofuel plantations as well as coal, copper, gold and bauxite mines are all at the centre of major land rights disputes.

A massive military force continued this week to raid communities opposed to oil companies' presence on the Niger delta. The delta, which provides 90% of Nigeria's foreign earnings, has always been volatile, but guns have flooded in and security has deteriorated. In the last month a military taskforce has been sent in and helicopter gunships have shelled villages suspected of harbouring militia. Thousands of people have fled. Activists from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta have responded by killing 12 soldiers and this week set fire to a Chevron oil facility. Yesterday seven more civilians were shot by the military.

The escalation of violence came in the week that Shell agreed to pay £9.7m to ethnic Ogoni families – whose homeland is in the delta – who had led a peaceful uprising against it and other oil companies in the 1990s, and who had taken the company to court in New York accusing it of complicity in writer Ken Saro-Wiwa's execution in 1995.

Meanwhile in West Papua, Indonesian forces protecting some of the world's largest mines have been accused of human rights violations. Hundreds of tribesmen have been killed in the last few years in clashes between the army and people with bows and arrows.

"An aggressive drive is taking place to extract the last remaining resources from indigenous territories," says Victoria Tauli-Corpus, an indigenous Filipino and chair of the UN permanent forum on indigenous issues. "There is a crisis of human rights. There are more and more arrests, killings and abuses.

"This is happening in Russia, Canada, the Philippines, Cambodia, Mongolia, Nigeria, the Amazon, all over Latin America, Papua New Guinea and Africa. It is global. We are seeing a human rights emergency. A battle is taking place for natural resources everywhere. Much of the world's natural capital – oil, gas, timber, minerals – lies on or beneath lands occupied by indigenous people," says Tauli-Corpus.

What until quite recently were isolated incidents of indigenous peoples in conflict with states and corporations are now becoming common as government-backed companies move deeper on to lands long ignored as unproductive or wild. As countries and the World Bank increase spending on major infrastructural projects to counter the economic crisis, the conflicts are expected to grow.

Indigenous groups say that large-scale mining is the most damaging. When new laws opened the Philippines up to international mining 10 years ago, companies flooded in and wreaked havoc in indigenous communities, says MP Clare Short, former UK international development secretary and now chair of the UK-based Working Group on Mining in the Philippines.

Short visited people affected by mining there in 2007: "I have never seen anything so systematically destructive. The environmental effects are catastrophic as are the effects on people's livelihoods. They take the tops off mountains, which are holy, they destroy the water sources and make it impossible to farm," she said.

In a report published earlier this year, the group said: "Mining generates or exacerbates corruption, fuels armed conflicts, increases militarisation and human rights abuses, including extrajudicial killings."

The arrival of dams, mining or oil spells cultural death for communities. The Dongria Kondh in Orissa, eastern India, are certain that their way of life will be destroyed when British FTSE 100 company Vedanta shortly starts to legally exploit their sacred Nyamgiri mountain for bauxite, the raw material for aluminium. The huge open cast mine will destroy a vast swath of untouched forest, and will reduce the mountain to an industrial wasteland. More than 60 villages will be affected.

"If Vedanta mines our mountain, the water will dry up. In the forest there are tigers, bears, monkeys. Where will they go? We have been living here for generations. Why should we leave?" asks Kumbradi, a tribesman. "We live here for Nyamgiri, for its trees and leaves and all that is here."

Davi Yanomami, a shaman of the Yanomami, one of the largest but most isolated Brazilian indigenous groups, came to London this week to warn MPs that the Amazonian forests were being destroyed, and to appeal for help to prevent his tribe being wiped out.

"History is repeating itself", he told the MPs. "Twenty years ago many thousand gold miners flooded into Yanomami land and one in five of us died from the diseases and violence they brought. We were in danger of being exterminated then, but people in Europe persuaded the Brazilian government to act and they were removed.

"But now 3,000 more miners and ranchers have come back. More are coming. They are bringing in guns, rafts, machines, and destroying and polluting rivers. People are being killed. They are opening up and expanding old airstrips. They are flooding into Yanomami land. We need your help.

"Governments must treat us with respect. This creates great suffering. We kill nothing, we live on the land, we never rob nature. Yet governments always want more. We are warning the world that our people will die."

According to Victor Menotti, director of the California-based International Forum on Globalisation, "This is a paradigm war taking place from the arctic to tropical forests. Wherever you find indigenous peoples you will find resource conflicts. It is a battle between the industrial and indigenous world views."

There is some hope, says Tauli-Corpus. "Indigenous peoples are now much more aware of their rights. They are challenging the companies and governments at every point."

In Ecuador, Chevron may be fined billions of dollars in the next few months if an epic court case goes against them. The company is accused of dumping, in the 1970s and 1980s, more than 19bn gallons of toxic waste and millions of gallons of crude oil into waste pits in the forests, leading to more than 1,400 cancer deaths and devastation of indigenous communities. The pits are said to be still there, mixing chemicals with groundwater and killing fish and wildlife.

The Ecuadorian courts have set damages at $27bn (£16.5bn). Chevron, which inherited the case when it bought Texaco, does not deny the original spills, but says the damage was cleaned up.

Back in the Niger delta, Shell was ordered to pay $1.5bn to the Ijaw people in 2006 – though the company has so far escaped paying the fines. After settling with Ogoni families in New York this week, it now faces a second class action suit in New York over alleged human rights abuses, and a further case in Holland brought by Niger Delta villagers working with Dutch groups.

Meanwhile, Exxon Mobil is being sued by Indonesian indigenous villagers who claim their guards committed human rights violations, and there are dozens of outstanding cases against other companies operating in the Niger Delta.

"Indigenous groups are using the courts more but there is still collusion at the highest levels in court systems to ignore land rights when they conflict with economic opportunities," says Larry Birns, director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs in Washington. "Everything is for sale, including the Indians' rights. Governments often do not recognise land titles of Indians and the big landowners just take the land."

Indigenous leaders want an immediate cessation to mining on their lands. Last month, a conference on mining and indigenous peoples in Manila called on governments to appoint an ombudsman or an international court system to handle indigenous peoples' complaints.

"Most indigenous peoples barely have resources to ensure their basic survival, much less to bring their cases to court. Members of the judiciary in many countries are bribed by corporations and are threatened or killed if they rule in favour of indigenous peoples.

"States have an obligation to provide them with better access to justice and maintain an independent judiciary," said the declaration.

But as the complaints grow, so does the chance that peaceful protests will grow into intractable conflicts as they have in Nigeria, West Papua and now Peru. "There is a massive resistance movement growing," says Clare Short. "But the danger is that as it grows, so does the violence."

Genocide once more

The news is sadly familiar. Indigenous people from the amazonian areas of Peru who objected to president Alan Garcia's nine decrees since April, essentially giving their lands to oil transnationals, were massacred over the course of the weekend. In all, more than twenty were killed, bringing back the spectre of genocide to this part of the world.

What is more depressing is the official reaction of Peru, headed by an inflamatory speech by the president himself. Apologies? There were none. Regrets? They were sadly missing. Instead, Alan Garcia launched on a diatribe against 'the forces of anti-development' - presumably those who are unimpressed by his macroeconomic policies - and against 'foreign intervention', a thinly veiled attempt to blame Bolivia for the massacre.

Not only is his position disgraceful and his accusations untrue. Alan Garcia has a knack for reminding Bolivians of the worst racist excesses in living memory that took place last September in Pando. And unfortunately he defends those excesses by condescendingly referring to Peru's 'natives' - a term that denotes not only contempt for indigenous peoples, but that denies them of all citizenship rights. Sounds familiar? The viscerous Bolivian extreme right speaks in exactly the same way and has shown to be prepared to act accordingly too.

Let's be clear. In wanting to make Peru's natural resources available to capital at any price, Alan Garcia, a populist demagogue, has shown to be prepared to criminalise any peaceful and democratic form of protest from civil society and, if necessary, to resort to murder, blaming Bolivia along the way.

But, being the leader of a country that has recently condemned former president Fujimori to 25 years imprisonment, Alan Garcia should be careful. And, Peru being situated next to a country that shows the world the example of a healthy political change with powerful social movements of which the indigenous movement is the spinal column, there is more than enough reasons to be concerned about the contagion effect of progressive politics.
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Alan Garcia, you should be worried.