Not all land defenders fight in remote forests and coastlands. Some take the battle to the centers of power: to courtrooms, parliament buildings and corporate headquarters.
The veneer of urban civility might be glossier here, but the struggle is no less dangerous.
In some cases, it can be worse.
Isela Gonzalez has been threatened more times than she can remember by university-educated men in suits, whose business interests — in logging, mining, agriculture and narcotics — are challenged by her work as director of Alianza Sierra Madre, which protects indigenous land rights in Mexico’s western Sierra Madre.
The warnings have been muttered on steps outside legal hearings, whispered on the telephone, or via conversations she has been deliberately allowed to overhear.
They are not idle.
The nurse-turned-activist has seen dozens of her fellow campaigners murdered in recent years.
Armed guards have been deployed by the state to provide her with 24-hour protection, panic-buttons have been installed in her office, locks have been upgraded in her home, and she and her staff have received crisis training, but her enemies, she says, can hire an assassin for as little as 100 pesos (US$5.31) or a few bottles of beer, regardless of whether she is in a remote village or Chihuahua city.
“Even if I am not in the community a hitman could come and kill me,” she said. “We have protocols to protect us, but we are at high risk, and we are conscious, fully aware, that even if we have bodyguards, if they want to do something to us they will do it.”
Mexico is rapidly becoming one of the most dangerous nations in the world for environmental and land activists.
Last year, 15 defenders were killed (a more than fivefold rise over the previous year), pushing the nation up from 14th to fourth place in the grim global rankings.
All but two of the victims were indigenous.
The most prominent in recent years was Isidro Baldenegro Lopez, a Tarahumara leader who won the Goldman environment prize for his efforts to protect the old-growth forests of pine and oak in the Sierra Madre.
He was killed by a gunman in January last year.
The backdrop is a broader wave of assassinations and disappearances of civil rights activists and journalists in Mexico.
While narco-gangs are usually blamed, the state is often complicit. Senior politicians receive bribes and kickbacks for granting lucrative mining and logging concessions on indigenous land. When local communities resist attempts to clear their forests, pollute their rivers or destroy their crops, they are met with violence and assassinations.
“This is about the government giving permits to exploit everything recently, and then you have communities who don’t want to sell the land, they have a different vision of things, they want to keep things as they are,” Gonzalez said.
Gonzalez has no material incentive to risk her life. She is not a member of the indigenous groups that she defends. She has no land at stake. She simply believes it is the right thing to do.
A nurse by training, she later switched to anthropology. Twenty-two years ago, her research took her for the first time to isolated villages among the pine-oak forests of the Sierra Madre, where she spent time with three peoples — the Raramuri, Odami and Tepehuan (who are together jointly named the Tarahumara by outsiders).
She was awestruck by their social structure, use of forest medicines and relationship with the land.
“It’s clear that they have a special connection at a spiritual level. They only take what they need, they never take more than that, they really care about the environment and the way that they interact with the forest,” Gonzalez said. “It’s a culture that laughs, it’s a culture that knows how to smile. I learned that other living beings such as animals and trees, water and plants, we shouldn’t see them as different from us, but as a whole.”
Alianza Sierra Madre initially started out as a biodiversity non-governmental organization, but it changed strategy when it realized the frontline of environmental protection was indigenous land.
The constitution and law is nominally on the side of indigenous groups, who account for about a sixth of Mexico’s 127 million population. They have the right to prior informed consent before any use of their land.
However, their territory is often disputed because for centuries they lived without any need for documentary proof of ownership. Even when they have it, the authorities often bypass them to grant concessions for mining, logging and agribusiness (often resulting in illegal marijuana or opium poppy crops).
The public justification is economic development. The private reality is bribes and personal interests.
To defend the Tarahumara’s rights, Gonzalez has organized protests, led occupations of government offices, filed lawsuits and compiled dossiers for the national government, the Inter-American Court for Human Rights and the UN.
Part of her motivation is to ensure the deaths of her friends are not for nothing.
“I keep doing this because some of these men and some of these women are not with us anymore. I am just telling a story; this is their story,” she said.
With risks rising, she now rarely visits the communities, but still campaigns on behalf of the 3,000 or so people who she describes as her companions in the struggle.
“Now that I cannot go, I have this urge to do something, to fill my day with activities, working toward the same goal, helping the communities because I wish I could be there,” she said.
At 63 years old, many people of her age might think of retiring, but she has no intention of easing up.
“I think of myself as a senior, I think I could stay in my home cooking for my family, I think I could just go out with my friends, but how could I do that when I know that this culture exists?” she said. “I believe in this fight and I believe we need to change as a country, and I believe the world needs to change. This is something that I will keep doing with Alianza or without them. My family knows this and I believe that I won’t stop until this is fixed or until I die.”
For those who want to fight alongside her, she says the only way to confront destructive economic interests is through civic activism and political change. If people see the fight for the Earth as distant, alien and unwinnable, she fears they will give up hope.
For Gonzalez, this plays into the hands of those who want to seize the land.
“They use ignorance and apathy in their favor,” she said. “This is the struggle that we have. Our society should make it their own.”
She believes Mexico is descending into a situation like that of Colombia, a nation with too many guns, too many drugs and a conflict between on one side — big corporate extractivists and the state — and on the other, a cluster of militias and insurgents fighting for the land rights of poor, often indigenous, communities.
Dealing with this growing conflict requires political action, better laws, and a realization of what the fight for the land and environment really means.
“We as a country are at war and we need to address this,” she said.
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this