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Fighting a Low-Intensity War, Indigenous Tupinamba Recover Their Land in Brazil

The extreme south of the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil is a region of intense conflict over indigenous lands. A judge asked Rosivaldo Ferreira da Silva, a leader from the indigenous Babau tribe, about the actions the Tupinamba are taking in order to recover their ancestral lands from the hands of rich landowners.

The extreme south of the state of Bahia in northeastern Brazil is a region of intense conflict over indigenous lands. A judge asked Rosivaldo Ferreira da Silva, a leader from the indigenous Babau tribe, about the actions the Tupinamba are taking in order to recover their ancestral lands from the hands of rich landowners.

“You said that your Enchanted One – the spirit of the ancestors of the Tupinamba – ordered you to take back your lands and that you will not return them, even if that means you have to die in a confrontation with the police,” the judge said. Da Silva responded: “Exactly.”

The judge, trying to change the idea that he had proposed, said, “But we can propose something that can mediate this situation. We can offer a basket of basic goods to families, something that they can live off of.”

Da Silva, indignant, responded, “We the Tupinamba, this is how we are, judge. If food is lacking in our homes, we will eat wild plants; we will eat what the land gives us; we are not going to ask for anything from anyone. Because then we would be allowing others to govern our lives.”

The Tupinamba were the first indigenous people to form a front against the Portuguese invasion in 1500 in Brazil. They are a great warrior people whose organizational structure uses tactics and strategies of war based on their worldview. In 2004, they started a process to recover their lands.

“Our goal was to stop deforestation. All the rivers would return to their natural pathways; nature would be laughing with happiness.”

The government body, the National Indian Foundation (FUNAI), recognized in its studies that the Tupinamba possess over 47,000 hectares of land, but the government still hasn’t authorized the demarcation of this territory. This is in violation of Article 169 of the International Labor Organization, which establishes their right to “the consultation and participation of indigenous peoples and tribes to decide their own priorities for the process of development as it affects their lives, beliefs, institutions and spiritual well-being and the lands they occupy or otherwise use, and to exercise control over their economic, social and cultural development, including the right to land and the use of natural resources found in their traditional lands.”

Even after having received only silence as a response from the government, the indigenous Tupinamba have recovered a good part of their land. They are one of the few indigenous groups in Brazil that has dared to self-demarcate their borders and occupy them at the same time. They reclaimed huge properties that were in the hands of landowners; they took over fresh water springs; they took over abandoned houses. In the community of Serra do Padeiro alone, close to 70 properties were taken over.

“We drove out the landowners who were deforesting and who did not need the land to live on because they have houses elsewhere. And the people that need a place to live, the small producers, will stay with us,” da Silva told Truthout. “Our goal was to stop deforestation; our motto is zero deforestation. All the rivers would return to their natural pathways; nature would be laughing with happiness; the animals would come back,” he added.

The reaction to all of this quickly became systematic and relentless. In 2008, police made their first large-scale attack in Serra do Padeiro. They invaded the Tupinamba territory with two helicopters, 130 agents and heavy vehicles. They said that they wanted to stop da Silva, but they didn’t have an arrest warrant. “It was a day of war. For an entire day, they had fun with us and we with them,” joked da Silva. “The fight for the Tupinamba is not an affront; we are children of war. The thing is that they want a war, but with a group that doesn’t know how to fight; they want us to sit back and cross our arms.”

Brazil’s Defense Ministry published a manual that encourages the use of military force to guarantee “public security.”

“They believed that we were going to flee, but this didn’t happen. When they came in and began to attack, our answer was to use slingshots and stones and we used the strategy of isolating them. The Enchanted Ones prohibited us from using bows and arrows; they said that these people aren’t ready for war with the Tupinamba, and in addition it isn’t in our best interest to cause a single casualty. They came onto our land without asking permission and afterward they couldn’t leave. And when the final day came, they were desperate and called for reinforcements, and only then were they able to remove the barricades that we put up in the roads.”

There’s interest in Tupinamba land from large-scale landowners and producers, such as the owners of the luxury tourist complexes that have been built in this territory, like the Hotel Fazenda da Lagao, with investors such as Arthur Bahia and Arminio Fraga. Fraga is a naturalized US citizen and former president of the Brazilian Central Bank. He is also an ex-member of the World Bank, and affirms that there are no indigenous people in the region, and that there are only opportunists who want to steal the land from the rightful owners.

Meanwhile, in President Dilma Rousseff’s new term, she has chosen to fill top positions with figures like businesswoman, rancher and senator, Katia Abreu, who is currently the head of the Ministry of Agriculture. Abreu is one of the main defenders of the coalition in Brazil’s Congress that is defending national and multinational agribusinesses in Brazil, which maintain a strong offensive against indigenous towns.

The FUNAI recognized the presence of no less than 4,700 Tupinamba people, concentrated in at least 23 communities, between the mountains and the coast of the state of Bahia – an area that extends from the Serra do Padeiro to the coast of Olivença and is immersed in the tropical jungle of the Mata Atlântica. The communities are distributed across two regions: the forest Tupinamba and those of the coast, and each town has its own leader.

Militarization of the Tupinamba Territory

In mid-February 2014, at the request of Jaques Wagner, then-governor of the state of Bahia and currently Brazil’s defense minister, the president signed an authorization from the federal government so that the army could enter into the territory of the Tupinamba in southern Bahia. Federal authorities were given permission to finish their incursion in one month, but it still continues today.

A month before, in January 2014, agents from the National Public Security Forces and the Federal Police built a base in the town of Serra do Padeiro. From that moment, the indigenous people have been constantly monitored and some of the land has been violently reintegrated into the territory belonging to big landholders.

“It is a strategy, because the landowners in the region want to kill me, along with the military”

These measures were taken after the Brazilian Ministry of Defense published a manual titled “How to guarantee law and order,” on December 20, 2013. It is a manual that encourages the use of military force in order to guarantee “public security.” It also enumerates the ways in which enemies are categorized, beginning with individuals and groups to organizations and social movements that are considered “oppositional forces,” emphasizing those that act in violation of “public order or security.”

Haroldo Heleno, from the Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI), in the state of Bahia, tells Truthout that the indigenous Tupinamba, in the process of self-demarcating and taking back their land, have suffered a constant campaign of criminalization. They have been written off as criminals, as invaders and as homeless. CIMI reported that the 2008 attack by the Federal Police in the town of Serra do Padeiro included more than 130 agents, two helicopters and 30 patrol cars. Twenty-two indigenous people were wounded by rubber bullets and gas bombs, and houses, community vehicles, food and school equipment were destroyed.

War Fire

A low fire burns inside a tree trunk until it turns to ash; it’s a fire that should be burning at all times, even on rainy days. It is the light of the Tupinamba ancestors; it is the center of the town; it is there where the ancestors made the most important decisions in the community, like when to go to war. Fernanda Barbosa Silva, who teaches the Tupinamba language to both indigenous and non-indigenous children in the community of Serra do Padeiro, told Truthout, “Here is where we have our planting ceremonies. Here we ask our Enchanted Ones to illuminate our paths. It is the fire of the Tupinamba people, our spiritual sustenance.”

The concept of war in the West is different than that of indigenous people. In Western war, the objective is to repress or destroy the enemy, and, in doing so, stop everything that stands in the way of private property. “Collective land ownership is the womb of crime and of the insurgency and because of that we must destroy it. There is no peace without private property,” says Geoffrey B. Demarest. Demarest is a researcher, former military member and graduate of the School of the Americas, which is administered by the US military, and was founded in 1946 in Panama with the objective of training Latin American soldiers in war and counterinsurgency techniques.

Serra do Padeiro is completely self-sufficient. It produces its own food in a system similar to agroecology.

Currently, Demarest is an ideologue and intellectual who is part of the so-called Bowman Expeditions, which are advancing across Central and South America and other countries where collective property ownership exists. The principal military objectives are to reach indigenous towns, in order to incorporate their territories into the model of private property, either through force or agreements.

For “us,” da Silva told Truthout, “this war is for life, in order to take care of our Enchanted Ones, which is to say, our ancestors that inhabit the forest and the mountains, who also take care of us and protect us. We, the Tupinamba, are not allowed to kill anyone; we are not interested in that.”

Low-intensity warfare, or irregular warfare, according to US military doctrine, says, “instead of formal military conflict, we are witnessing a series of ‘irregular’ wars: terrorism, guerrilla insurgencies, resistance movements, asymmetrical insurgencies and conflicts in general, which must be attacked with all means necessary.”

The indigenous Zapatista movement in Mexico calls it a war of “comprehensive fatigue,” a war strategy that uses paramilitary units, paid mercenaries and public political programs in order to contain or reduce the support of the social bases for resistance movements that have been labeled as terrorists or insurgents.

Persecution

After an arrest warrant was issued by a judge in February 2014 in southern Bahia, the indigenous Babau leader decided to turn himself in. After doing so, da Silva argued that the Tupinamba do not run away. According to the arrest warrant, he was accused of having ordered the murder of a farmer in the region. “It is a strategy, because the landowners in the region want to kill me, along with the military,” he said. Five days after turning himself in, after a preliminary decision by Brazil’s Supreme Court, he was freed.

In 2009, the arrest of one of da Silva’s brothers was registered, along with five other indigenous individuals who were also tortured by the Federal Police. And that was how in the successive years, until 2014, da Silva was arrested for a variety of crimes that his accusers have never been able to prove.

Attacks on Autonomy

“We and nature are one; we are one with our ancestry,” da Silva told Truthout. “Here you will not find a woman abused by her partner, children abused by their parents; you will not find people marrying one another for fun. If we want to have an animal close to us, we put food in the door of the house, and it will come to eat close to us.”

Serra do Padeiro is completely self-sufficient. It produces its own food in a system similar to agroecology, and the excesses are sold.

“The police started to make incursions into our towns in the planting season. The objective was to ruin our harvest.”

“In order to know when to plant, we observe the moon, the time of the rains, if the wind from the east is going to pass through our crops. Do you know how to recognize the wind from the east? Look there, you are looking at that tree, the one with the dry leaf tips. The wind from the east passes there. It is a sorrowful wind that brings sickness to plants and people; it is strong; it is powerful. So you must recognize the paths where this wind blows and stay away from it. You cannot stay in the path of that which does not want to be interrupted, so that is why we pay a lot of attention,” da Silva said.

The Tupinamba have celebrations all year long; their land is very productive. They grow cacao, coffee, bananas, manioc and a large variety of fruits and vegetables. Every time a party is held, there is food in abundance and everyone is invited to participate. It is striking how, despite the constant closeness of danger, they continue to smile.

“We export cacao, but we do not worry about producing in order to sell. First we eat, we are happy, and that is our concern. And what is left over we sell in order to buy the extra things that we need,” Maria da Gloria de Jesus told Truthout. She is 50 years old and planted 40,000 pineapple plants by herself. She also received the impact of a rubber bullet in the chest by the Federal Police in one of their offenses in the territory. “Agroecology is nothing more than indigenous knowledge, a circular understanding, that has a relationship with the animals of the forest, the birds, even the smallest of insects,” de Jesus said.

The food sovereignty of the Tupinamba was put at risk in 2007, after a series of attempts to try and undermine the sustainability the indigenous people had attained. “We perceived that the police started to make incursions into our towns in the planting season, between the months of May and August. We live off of what we plant, so the objective was to ruin our harvest,” da Silva said. “But they were not able to affect us.”

Historical Context of the Tupinamba

According to the document created in 2006 by the Ministry of Education and UNESCO, the ethnologist Curt Nimuendaju demonstrated in his ethnohistorical map the existence of more than 1,400 indigenous groups in “discovered” territories in Brazil since 1500. They were peoples with huge linguistic diversity: Tupi-Guarani, Ge, Carib, Arawak, Xiriana and Tucan, to name a few. They also had a great geographical diversity and diverse forms of social organization. Julian Steward, in the book Handbook of South American Indians, calculated that more than 1.5 million indigenous people lived in Brazil; and William Denevan projected the existence of almost 5 million indigenous people in the Amazon alone.

Following the data gathered by the Education Ministry’s document, the Tupinamba people were present across the state of Bahia, the lower Amazon in the northeast coast, almost to the state of Sao Paulo. The most significant loss of life suffered by indigenous people resulted from the war of suppression and destruction that drove out thousands of indigenous people, according to the document, but above all, was due to the introduction of illnesses such as smallpox, measles and tuberculosis, which quickly decimated entire peoples. This was described in the writings of the Jesuit priest Jose de Anchieta, who was present for part of the historical context during the 1500s.

We Are All Tupinamba

According to the accounts of Maria da Gloria, mother of the chief indigenous Babau Tupinamba, during the Portuguese colonization, the indigenous people welcomed slaves who had fled from plantations or sugar factories. “That explains why some Tupinamba towns are mixed to this day; all of us are Tupinamba. We have our knowledge that is alive, our customs and our traditions. It is a different form of life than that of the white people. But the government uses this to say that the Tupinamba people are in extinction. We say that no! We are alive; these are the lands of our ancestors and they are priceless,” he said.

Chaos

“Our Enchanted Ones tell us about what is going to happen in the world and what we have to do to protect ourselves. If we have to go to war, it will be to the end. We want to guarantee our lands as quickly as possible because the world is going to enter into a period of total chaos,” da Silva said. “In the future, the indigenous lands will be the only places where one can go to interact with nature. So we are not going to wait for the demarcation of the state: These are our ancestral lands and we are the only ones that know them, because we belong to the Tupinamba land.”

Protests in Brazil and Their Repression

Trained according to US military doctrine, Brazil's military police, an inheritance from the dictatorships of the 1960s, have been intensely repressing protesters in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. Since the beginning of this year, the principal streets of São Paulo, one of the biggest cities in the world, have been taken over by hundreds of protesters demanding a return to zero-cost public transportation. This action was taken due to a 17 percent rise in the cost of fares.

In the middle of 2013, thousands of protesters took to the streets after the first price hike of 20 cents (in Brazilian reals), protesting both the hike and the poor quality of public transportation. During that same time, the issue of excessive government expenditures prior to the 2014 World Cup and the Olympic Games planned for 2016 was emerging.

During 2014 Christmas festivities, the government of São Paulo announced an increase in the cost of public transportation from 3 to 3.5 Brazilian reals. The same thing happened in 17 of the 27 state capitals of Brazil, with hikes ranging from 2.7 to 20.9 percent.

"Things are looking more and more like they did during the dictatorship. Civil and military police are an inheritance of the dictatorship. Some of them received training from the mercenary company called Academi and SWAT-Dallas."

In São Paulo, the hike was accompanied by a benefit package of 48 types of free passes for low-income students. It was a demobilization strategy, according to Mario Constantino, a member of the group Anti-Capitalist Youth, because the passes were made available to a small percentage of youth only. "The government thought that with the end of the year festivities, people wouldn't mobilize. At the same time, it made a type of monthly free pass available to low-income students, but this didn't respond to the movement's central demand which is the right of access to the city and to be able to move freely," he told Truthout.

During January 2015, there have been at least six large protests. In the first protest, more than 30,000 people gathered and the government acted rapidly and with excessive violence to break it up. "They have a historical fear. The protests that we did in 2013 and 2014 were massive . . . and they are afraid that this could grow," Marcela Fleury, a member of the Free Territory Movement, told Truthout.

Another member of the Free Pass Movement (MPL), who only identified herself as Patricia, told Truthout that movement is a right, and thus, transportation should be free. "Traveling around São Paulo is very expensive compared to people's incomes. Here, only those who can pay for transportation have access to the city. One can only live here if one can pay for rent and food. It is an exclusive city. Transportation should be free because it is a right to have access to free movement."

Human Rights Violations

In the majority of the protests, the modus operandi of the military police has been to break them up as quickly as possible, which has led to a series of human rights violations against protesters. There have been arrests and people wounded by rubber-coated bullets and gas canisters that are shot directly at the bodies of protesters. "The government continues to criminalize social protest, and this is a violation of the universal right to protest. They don't want people in the streets. They are afraid because these protests are challenging the power and privileges of an economic elite that has been created in Brazil," Eloisa Samy told Truthout. Samy is a lawyer in Rio de Janeiro, and was detained along with 22 other protesters in 2014 during the World Cup. She was accused of belonging to an armed group, and resorted to requesting political asylum in Uruguay. Currently, Samy's case is being tried in Brazilian courts, together with those of other protesters accused of the same crime.

US Military Doctrine

"Things are looking more and more like they did during the dictatorship. Civil and military police are an inheritance of the dictatorship. Some of them received training from the mercenary company called Academi and SWAT-Dallas," Samy said.

Prior to the events of the 2014 World Cup, at least 22 military and federal police were trained by the US company Academi - previously Blackwater - to contain acts of "terrorism." This term alludes to the US concept of security in its "war on terror," where the enemy is found within the citizen population, and must be attacked using all possible means, according to the counterinsurgency manual of the United States (FM-3-24, MCWP-3-33.5). "The concepts of the 'enemy' and of 'terrorism' are the base of a type of security with a large ideological component, according to US military doctrine. It is a logic of commercialization, of privatization and outsourcing of security and, thus, of violence," researcher Esther Solano Gallego told Truthout.

"We are living in a time of extreme exclusion and the bourgeoisie is afraid that the people will take to the streets."

Academi is considered the biggest private army in the world. Since its inception - just after 9/11 under the Blackwater name - it obtained private security contracts with the administration of George W. Bush, for a total of more than $1 billion, according to Jeremy Scahill in his book Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army. Two years after its creation, the company, responsible for the deaths of 17 civilians in Iraq, changed its name to Xe Services in an effort to clean up its reputation. In 2010, when it was sold to a group of private investors, it changed its name again, this time to Academi.

Another specific case is that of the state of Espirito Santo and Marcos Do Val, an ex-military member of the 38th Battalion of the Brazilian Infantry. He received training from Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) forces in the United States and was one of the strategists who coordinated the repression of protesters in 2014. "In Espirito Santo, he is a well-known figure. He participated in the [crackdown against] protests in 2014. It is known that he has close ties to the state and to security groups in the United States. He brings military and police personnel here to give trainings in our country," Joao Lyrio, who was present for and documented the protests in Espirito Santo, told Truthout.

Do Val doesn't just have ties with SWAT, says the Brazilian writer Ana Ligia Lira, who recently published a book titled A Brazilian in the SWAT, which is based on Do Val's career. He also worked in the United States, China, France, Italy, Portugal and Brazil with entities including NASA, the FBI, the Navy SEALS and the Vatican.

It should be mentioned that the training of SWAT teams is done in order to carry out high-risk operations that are outside of the capacity of regular officials, such as the rescue of hostages, fighting against terrorism and operations against heavily armed criminal groups. Do Val has converted private security into big business, and now gives courses to military police from various countries, through the private company that he founded, Police Training International Inc. (CATI), which is considered the first and only multinational police training business in the world. He also gives courses to wealthy Brazilian businessmen, and has given courses together with members of the Rio de Janeiro Police Battalion of Special Operations and Tactics, a division of the military police in São Paulo.

"What we are living in Brazil, and more specifically in the city of São Paulo, is that the Brazilian elite are taking away the societal right to health care, to education and to public transportation, with tendencies toward privatization."

"It is members of the military who are in the streets and they are trained to kill, trained for war. They don't know how to deal with peaceful disturbances and their superiors who are giving the orders are directly responsible. Being black or poor here is synonymous with being dangerous, with crime. And now those who protest in the streets have reached the level of terrorist," Samy said.

The protests have also been accompanied by an endless stream of music groups, which do not consider themselves terrorists. "There are no terrorists here; I am not a terrorist. I am fighting and my weapon is my music," musician Fernando Iza told Truthout.

According to Fleury, the police look to create a context of fear and terror so that people will stop going to the demonstrations, because a crisis situation is beginning to develop, and the government doesn't have the ability to respond. "Right now, there is a water crisis in São Paulo and unemployment is rising. To this, we add the rise in the cost of transportation, and that's why we are taking to the streets."

Extreme Right-Wing Politicians in a Leftist Government

The discontent of the protesters is directed at both the local and federal governments. According to Samy, the government of Dilma Rousseff is defending the interests of the economic groups that control Brazil. She also said that today one can't even speak of a progressive government; she thinks that the Brazilian people have lost faith in the institutions, in the Worker's Party and in the other political parties, just as they've lost faith in the government itself. "We are living in a time of extreme exclusion and the bourgeoisie is afraid that the people will take to the streets. Justification is provided for police and repression, but nothing is being said about the crisis that is being lived in the country. The people of Latin America should know that a left-wing government does not exist here," she said.

The controversial changes to the political structure made by Brazil's president have not only provoked discontent in different social sectors in the country, but among a good part of the people who gave her their vote as well. The first signs of structural changes came with the naming of ministers - done in the first month of Rousseff's second presidential term - who historically have represented more conservative sectors of Brazilian society.

For example, the position of treasury minister will be filled by Joaquim Levy, the former director of Bradesco Asset Management, the investment bank of the Bradesco organization. Known as a "Chicago boy" for receiving his education at the University of Chicago, he was the director of the Federal Reserve in Brazil and formerly worked for the International Monetary Fund (IMF). His position in defense of neoliberal policies, in alignment with the theories of Milton Friedman and George Stigler, are evident in his interviews and opinion articles.

Katia Abreu - a businesswoman, rancher and senator who is one of the primary defenders of extreme right positions in the National Congress - was named to head the Ministry of Agriculture. And the minister of cities will be Gilberto Kassab, the ex-prefect of São Paulo, harshly criticized by popular urban movements during his two terms between 2006 and 2012, for promoting billion-dollar projects that led to the displacement of thousands of families.

According to Mario Constantino, the government was elected as if it was left-wing, but it continues with neoliberal policies. "They promised a series of things, but the worst is that the ministry is made up of people well-known by the Brazilian people to be extremely right-wing and it will be disastrous. We are seeing that the same political economy of the right-wing governments is being implemented now," Constantino said.

The Protests Will Continue

The indignation of the protesters is increasing, and mobilizations threaten to gain strength. "What we are living in Brazil, and more specifically in the city of São Paulo, is that the Brazilian elite are taking away the societal right to health care, to education and to public transportation, with tendencies toward privatization," said Patricia from the Free Pass Movement.

According to Heudes Cassio, also of the Free Pass Movement, the movement for cost-free transportation has not negotiated with the federal government and it doesn't plan to. "The Free Pass Movement does not have dialogue with the government; our conversations are in the streets. Our demand is clear, against the fare and against the rate hikes," Cassio told Truthout.

"We are here to bring down the fare, and we are looking to get everyone involved, because this is just the beginning. Our purchasing power has fallen; now we can't buy more than what we could before - and it costs us much more to pay our rent," Marcela Fleury said.

Fleury said that they will not be co-opted by the government, as other movements have been neutralized through negotiations. To the contrary, she argues that the slogan is clear: "No fares!" "If we don't receive a clear response, the movement could radicalize. The refrain of the Free Territory Movement is the construction of popular power," she added.

It is February, and three protests have taken place on the outskirts of the great São Paulo metropolis, along with another mega-demonstration. All were accompanied by the Tactical Forces of the Military Police, as well as by personnel trained during the World Cup, called the Battalion for Large Events, better known as "Robocops."

Published in ⇒ Truthout

Green Neocolonialism, Afro-Brazilian Rebellion in Brazil

The Afro-Brazilian Quilombola people were forced from their land in Brazil in order to make way for eucalyptus plantations, which produce toilet paper destined for Western markets. But they are resisting by replanting native trees and food crops, and working for a post-eucalyptus reality.

The principal use for the cellulose found in eucalyptus plants in Brazil is disposable paper products, such as toilet paper and paper towels - products most in demand in first-world markets. Yet these types of paper products generate social and environmental impacts in places in Brazil where many communities have never even had access to them.

The region known as Sape do Norte, which includes the cities of Sao Mateus and Conceicao da Barra, in the state of Espirito Santo, in Brazil, has been heavily affected by eucalyptus plantations. In Sao Mateus, for example, the plantations occupy 70 percent of the territory. From Vitoria, the capital of Espirito Santo, to Sao Mateus, a stretch of close to 300 kilometers in length is covered by eucalyptus trees. In some places, small remnants of the native forest and its biodiversity can be seen, but only for a few hectares, quickly passed by in a car.

"There were monoculture plantations in unlikely places, near springs and in zones where aquifers are replenished. The forests along the riverbank were cut down; the path of the water was cut off; lakes were filled in with dirt - and the biodiversity of the Atlantic forests was decimated with insecticides and herbicides."

This area is also a symbol of Afro-Brazilian resistance; it is the land of the Quilombolas. The name Quilombola comes from the Kimbundu language, one of the Bantu languages widely spoken in Angola. Places where rebel or fugitive slaves lived were called quilombo - in hidden corners of the city or out in the countryside. From there the word Quilombola is derived, used in Brazil to describe a rebellious person of African descent.

"Quilombola is a specific type of person of African descent. They were brought from Africa during colonial times like the others, but they refused to submit to slavery and represented Black resistance. They built communities, called quilombos, fleeing from slavery in Brazil, living in isolated communities made up of 20 or 30 families, where they lived autonomously. Their descendants stayed in those in these places," Marcelo Calazans told Truthout. He works with the Federation of Organizations for Social and Educational Assistance (FASE), an organization that has worked for 30 years on issues related to the impacts of eucalyptus cultivation in the state of Espirito Santo.

In Sao Mateus, there was a port where people recently brought from Africa were bought and sold. Many of them fled the ships before they reached the docks. They escaped and sought refuge in the forests.

Slaves were emancipated in 1888, but emancipation was not accompanied by measures that would have permitted Afro-Brazilian communities to continue living in rural zones. A century later, these communities were legally recognized in the 1988 constitution, although it did not guarantee the preservation of the quilombo territories. With or without official recognition, a large number of these communities survived in rural areas, as evidenced by the communities of Sape do Norte.

The machine that cuts down the eucalyptus trees. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F)

It is a forest without flowers, without smells, without animals; not a single bird flies through this place.

In the 1960s, with the arrival of the eucalyptus cellulose extraction industry, the Quilombolas suffered a new blow and families were forced to abandon their land, some moving to the big cities in search of survival, where they ended up in the huge favelas, or slums. It is estimated that before the arrival of eucalyptus, there were around 15,000 Quilombola families. Today that number has dropped to 1,200 families who reorganized themselves into 32 communities in Sape do Norte. These Quilombola descendants are dispersed in communities isolated from one another by eucalyptus plantations, living under the pressure of the cellulose industry and its effects.

"There were monoculture plantations in unlikely places, near springs and in zones where aquifers are replenished. The forests along the riverbank were cut down; the path of the water was cut off; lakes were filled in with dirt - and the biodiversity of the Atlantic forests was decimated with insecticides and herbicides. This in turn made agricultural cultivation impossible, unless pesticides were used," according to Simone Batista Ferreira, a researcher with the geography department of the Federal University of Espirito Santo.

A Global Leader in Cellulose Extraction

The company Aracruz Celulose arrived in Espirito Santo in the 1960s. It was initially made up of shareholders such as Souza Cruz (a subsidiary of British American Tobacco), the Lorentzen family Group - which is connected to Norwegian royalty - and the Safra Group, with each having 28 percent ownership. The Brazilian state was a partner through its purchase of stock through the National Economic Development Bank (BNDE) - now referred to as the BNDES - for a share later reduced to 12 percent. In 2009, Aracruz Celulose changed its name and Fibria Celulose was born, the result of the merger of Aracruz Celulose and Votorantim Celulose and Paper (VCP). Today, Fibria is considered a global leader in the production of eucalyptus cellulose. It is the only company in the global forestry industry that is listed on the Dow Jones index and traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

Lifeless Forests

It is a forest without flowers, without smells, without animals; not a single bird flies through this place - a dubious forest, of a uniform green color, full of emaciated trees with thin, tall trunks that look like shaky pillars. In Ecuador, eucalyptus plantations are known as silent forests because there are no birds. In Chile, they are called military forests because, aside from their green characteristic military-uniform hue, the trees are planted in rigid lines. In Brazil, they are called "green deserts" because they contain no life.

Brazil is the fourth largest producer of cellulose worldwide, after Canada, the United States and China. According to the 2014 report on the Brazilian Tree and Forest Industry (IBA), with statistics from 2013, the area where forests were cultivated in Brazil reached 7.6 million hectares in 2013. Eucalyptus represents 72 percent of the total, with a total area of just under 5.5 million hectares. In 2013, 15.1 million tons of cellulose and 10.4 million tons of paper were produced. The industry's objective is to reach production levels of 22 million tons of cellulose in Brazil by the year 2020.

Paper factory in the city of Aracruz. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F)

International Demand

According to economist Helder Gomes, a member of the Alert Against the Green Desert Network, in the 1960s, international markets were under pressure due to increased demand for pulp and paper and the difficulty of widening production in countries where eucalyptus had traditionally been produced. "In the 1960s, studies done by the FAO [UN Food and Agriculture Organization] indicated the difficulty of expanding production in producing countries, due to the availability of land in central countries, the long period of maturation and the pressure from social movements against the rise in contaminating emissions and against the expansion of monocultures," Gomes told Truthout.

This forced international bodies, such as the FAO itself, Gomes said, to begin subsidizing the expansion of forestry programs in countries like Brazil, where there were favorable ecological conditions for the rapid growth of forests, available land, an abundance of cheap labor, and government policies that would benefit and support the industry.

A quilombola house in a reclaimed area. There were eucalpytus plantations here for over 49 years. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F)

Destruction

Aracruz Celulose is directly responsible for the destruction of at least 43,000 hectares of tropical rainforest in the municipality of Aracruz. It is a municipality that, in addition to the plantations, is home to three of the primary factories that process tree cellulose.

"Of the 40 indigenous communities that existed during the first years of this industry, only six remained."

This destruction was documented in an environmental impact evaluation report completed by the Technological Institute of the Espirito Santo State University in 1988, which was required in order for the company to obtain the permits for its first production expansion. According to the report, "through aerial photograph analysis obtained at the start of the 1970s, it was found that 30 percent of the surface of Aracruz was covered by native forests, which were then substituted for homogeneous eucalyptus trees."

Aracruz did not only destroy the forest, but also forced the communities that lived there to leave. "Of the 40 indigenous communities that existed during the first years of this industry, only six remained," said Sebastiao Ribeiro Filho, a lawyer and member of the Alert Against the Green Desert Network.

Toxic Bleach

The chain of production of cellulose, beyond creating homogeneous landscapes, also produces noxious smells. While walking through the city of Aracruz, the air is suddenly filled with an acidic stench. "It's bleach!" said FASE's Calazans, who tells us why it smells like it does. "In order to bleach the paper, millions of liters of chemicals are required, among them hydrogen peroxide and bleach, which are prohibited in many countries. There is no strict regulation of their use. Afterward, the waste goes directly to the sea."

"The World Trade Organization, the World Bank and governments that promote this system, which only a few multinational corporations benefit from, are causing an economic genocide and destroying traditional agriculture, and this means the destruction of entire towns and communities."

According to Luiz Alberto Loureiro, a former employee of Aracruz Celulose, the plantations are constantly attacked by pests and other plant species that have to be combated using chemicals such as Glifosato or Mirex. The insecticide is prohibited in all its formulations and uses because it is harmful to human health and to the environment. "The workers die of poisoning and from accidents, and they don't talk about this," Loureiro said. "Employees don't receive training regarding [the risk of] poisoning and many times they bring their work clothes home and wash them with their children's clothes."

Employment Promises

According to Sebastiao Pinheiro, agronomist and professor at the Rio Grande do Sul University, eucalyptus plantations do not generate employment; they actually destroy the source of employment for thousands of families. "The green deserts do not create jobs. Four hundred hectares of eucalyptus would be required to create one job. In family or small-scale agriculture, 10 people are required for one hectare. The World Trade Organization, the World Bank and governments that promote this system, which only a few multinational corporations benefit from, are causing an economic genocide and destroying traditional agriculture, and this means the destruction of entire towns and communities," Pinheiro told Truthout.

Fibria Celulose company. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F)

Memory of Destruction

"I remember the Atlantic forests. We lived off of agriculture in the countryside, and from hunting. I also remember when the company arrived. The devastation was not tree by tree; it was done using giant chains 100 meters long pulled by tractors, destroying everything in its path. Each link in the chain must have weighed 100 kilograms. There were trees with huge diameters that couldn't withstand the chains," John Ramos de Souza said. He is Quilombola and from the Angelim 1 community. "I saw many monstrous things done by the company. I saw without understanding, without knowing what the consequences would be, and now we are paying the price."

The National Public Ministry, in November 2014, suspended one of the credit lines of Fibria as a cautionary measure. It was the one from the federal government's National Economic and Social Development Bank that went to the Quilombola zone in northern Espirito Santo.

Fibria is being accused of fraud for the way it obtained land for its plantations. According to the lawsuit, at the beginning of 1970, former employees of the company claimed to be small-scale farmers before the state government in Espirito Santo, with the goal of obtaining titles for the "unused" land. Afterward, the employees transferred these property titles for land located between Conceicao da Barra and Sao Mateus, to Fibria. In the majority of cases, the period in which the areas remained legal property of the employees didn't last even a week before they were transferred.

Eucalyptus trees harvested in one day. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F)

Quilombolas Resist Eucalyptus

ARUE Ticumbi. ARUE Ticumbi.
What did the people do wrong?
What did the people do that was so wrong?

These questions are part of a song that was sung by African descendants during the time of slavery and that the Quilombolas of Barra da Conceicao maintain as a tradition in a ritual called Ticumbi. In the song, they ask Saint Benito the causes of all the loss they have suffered: the loss of their land, the forests and the water resources.

Today, the song seems to gain another dimension in Ticumbi master Souza's voice: one of resistance. The culture of his ancestors serves as a point of strength in order to resist new forms of slavery, this time due to the neocolonialism of eucalyptus. "We are communities cut off by eucalyptus and we are here resisting," Souza said.

He tells the story of his father, who, in the 1960s and '70s was forced off his land twice, which is where he obtained subsistence for his family. "The people who claimed to be the owners of the land showed up and pressured us to leave. At that time we were afraid and we left. It was more difficult to confront. And that was how the land was transferred to the company [Aracruz]," he said.

"We have no time to lose. Our path against eucalyptus means returning to the land that belonged to our ancestors and continuing to grow food."

Resistance is no longer sufficient, according to Vando Falcao Souza, John Ramos da Souza's son. Advancing is crucial. "We have no time to lose. Our path against eucalyptus means returning to the land that belonged to our ancestors and continuing to grow food," he tells Truthout.

Angelim 1 is a place of land recovery for the Quilombola families. After the clear-cutting of trees by the company, families returned to the area and began a process of soil regeneration. "After 40 years of planting eucalyptus in the same place, a transition process is necessary. The soil is very dry; it rains and the water disappears. Many said that we wouldn't be able to plant anything, but we are seeing that with patience and a lot of work it is possible. In five years I think we will be able to make it so that the soil is how it was before the eucalyptus were planted," said Falcao.

New plants have already started to flower, and they call them the transition to a post-eucalyptus time. Generally, the transition is started with plants such as watermelon, yucca, pumpkin and beans. "Corn and coffee still won't grow. We are already growing various species of beans and we are starting to sell them in small markets in the community. The goal is to form a sort of cooperative here," he said.

Leaving the Senzalas

A few kilometers from Angelim 1, land recuperation is also taking place in Linharinho. There, the transition effort is to plant according to an agroecological model in order to recuperate the soil, which means planting food crops along with native forest species. "After clearing the land of eucalyptus, the technique is to plant trees from a native forest that are brought from other places, and around these trees, other crops such beans and pumpkins are planted. This is how we are going to rebuild the forest and the harvest at the same time. The process is slow, it will require even six or seven years for the wild animals to return again and for the water resources to recover," Antonio Rodrigues de Oliveira, who is Quilombola, told Truthout.

"What we are doing here is what our ancestors did. They fled from conditions of slavery and created conditions for life in isolated places. They opened clearings and produced from the earth."

Rodrigues says that he arrived in this place with few resources, with only his head held high, his hands, and the necessary courage. "We can't expect anything from the government, or from the corporations, or from anyone. We have to take up the hoe, go into the land, build a hut, dig a well . . . carry water, even push with a donkey if necessary. Never again will we die of hunger . . . no, no, we will not die. We will go slowly because we don't have infrastructure, but we will do it," he said.

He also says that the situation is difficult and he remembers that the company arrived to plant eucalyptus even in the cemetery where his grandparents were buried. "They left us with almost nothing, just some adapted rodents, wild pigs and armadillos living as we lived, migrating and searching for what was necessary to survive." He believes, however, that there is no time to complain; it is time to work hard and rebuild what has been destroyed.

He doesn't hesitate to compare the situation in his community to that of his ancestors. "What we are doing here is what our ancestors did. They fled from conditions of slavery, known as Senzala [the place where slaves were held as prisoners on huge plantations] and created conditions for life in isolated places. They opened clearings and produced from the earth. Here is a Quilombo, the place of liberation," said Rodrigues, who has worked on various plantations and at one point migrated to the city.

Culture of Transition

Within the cellulose industry complex, the number of eucalyptus trees that are harvested every day establishes the rhythm and velocity of production. In order to operate at maximum production levels, a culture of homogenization must prevail. Flat land, long trees that are thin and without branches, and soil free of impediments are key. Here, diversity is an obstacle.

"Perhaps in 100 years, a Quilombola individual will look at the eucalyptus plantation and say that it is a forest, because he won't have the reference of what a native forest is. The cellulose company knows that if this memory is broken, there will be no more problems with resistance."

Joao Guimaraes, also from Angelim 1, tells Truthout that it is necessary to build the knowledge that will allow a cultural shift in the transition to a post-eucalyptus reality. "We can no longer live lamenting the disappearance of the river and the fresh water spring that dried up and the trees that disappeared, the birds that have left. The Atlantic Forest is gone now, and we have to regenerate it. These 40 years of eucalyptus plantations will not be forgotten overnight, which is why we have to work hard, experimenting with how it is that we are going to go about this recovery, with trial and error, in order to build transitional knowledge," Guimaraes said.

The land that has been retaken is part of this process. "These areas are serving so that we can create this understanding of the transition. We live with certain amounts of tension due to the fact that this land is being disputed and they could force us to leave at whatever time the company requests it. But we have no other option. As they advance with their modern machines, our form of insurgence is to plant food with our hoes. It's slow, but we are recuperating the land and our independence," he said.

This is the first generation that is retaking land primarily for the production of food. "It is the memory of the oldest ones that is strengthening our struggle," Guimaraes told Truthout.

The Struggle for Memory

One of the controversies at play is the memory of what the Atlantic Forest used to be and the passing on of this memory to the younger generations. "Perhaps in 100 years, a Quilombola individual will look at the eucalyptus plantation and say that it is a forest, because he won't have the reference of what a native forest is," Calazans said. "The cellulose company knows that if this memory is broken, there will be no more problems with resistance."

The generation of people in the state of Espirito Santo that remember the Atlantic Forest will be gone within the next 30 years. "These people have seen and lived in the forest. If they die and we still have not transitioned beyond eucalyptus back to native forests and traditional agriculture," said Calazans, "it will never happen."

"Memory assures the dream of these territories. The day that memory dies completely, we will no longer be able to think in a post-eucalyptus time," he added. "We have to invest in building understanding of this transition. These next three decades are strategically important in this fight."

Published in Truthout

REDD, Neo-Colonialism in the Land of the Pataxo Warriors

Photo by Santiago Navarro F

It’s 5 o’clock in the morning, southern cone time, on Oct. 13, 2014. The Pataxo indigenous people of the far southern region of the state of Bahía, in the northeast of Brazil, form three barricades across the BR101 Highway in the region of Monte Pascoal, in the city of Itamaraju, one of the main roads connecting the northern and southern parts of the country.

They have blocked the highway that runs along the edge of their territory with branches, sticks, and old tires,  stopping hundreds of trucks transporting merchandise from transnational corporations. It doesn’t take police long to arrive. The indigenous people are aware of the possibility of repression. Some have painted their bodies with a mixture of colors– yellow, red, black–colors that their grandfathers used to announce war. Others contrast in white, the sign of peace. Indelible colors on the skin of these people, survivors of an unjust war that has lasted for over five centuries.

The atmosphere grew tense as Federal Police came in, although this was no surprise to the Pataxo. They have been long been rejected by cattle farmers, businessmen and people living in cities close to Monte Pascoal–one of the richest areas in terms of flora and fauna in the world. The area conserves what’s left of the Mata Atlántica, a formation of neotropical vegetation present in Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

The day they closed down the freeway, many locals openly expressed their hostility. Walking through the streets, you could hear the pejorative comments such as, “These Indians are going to steal all of our land.”

“Since 2010, indigenous people have intensified the re-taking of their lands in a process of self-demarcation,” explains Domingos Andrade, of the Indigenous Missionary Center (CIMI), to the Americas Program. Until recently, indigenous groups possessed 8,627 hectares of land, authorized in the 1990s. But the biggest part of this territory is sand and is not suitable for agriculture.

“The National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI) just completed a study that ‘confirms’ that these lands are indigenous, but the government has not authorized it. It is a policy of the government not to demarcate indigenous territories because of pressure from agribusiness,”

ARGUES ANDRADE.

Nomacaxhi Pataxo explains to the Americas Program that the town of Pataxo is fighting for the demarcation of its territory. “We want our lands so that our children can live and in order to conserve our culture. The government together with corporations have destroyed the natural environment with their development policies,” he affirms. He is of indigenous descent and lives in the town Boca da Mata, at the entrance of the forest.

What Nomacaxchi does not know is that a few kilometers from there, his relatives from the town Boca da Mata are working on a project that represents another a way to commercialize and exploit the forests. This threat, though less-perceptible than the huge infrastructure projects or like the deforestation for livestock farming, still exists. It is a project in Monte Pascoal for carbon offset credits. When asked about the existence of the project in the region, Pataxo confirms it. “There are reforestation projects carried out by indigenous people with money from the federal government, but we were unaware of the sale of carbon credits.”

These mechanisms are guided by a concept of the forest that is very different than the indigenous one. The indigenous concept takes into account nature’s time scale and knows how to communicate with it. Time for conservation in terms of carbon accumulation is different, has been thought up by the world’s biggest corporations, who are now betting on nature in the world’s principal stock markets, such as Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange. It is they who plan the ways in which the value of biodiversity is calculated, as the number of those who are expulsed or who become refugees in the name of conservation continues to grow globally. It is principally native towns that are affected.

The Conference of the Parties (COP 20), where the world’s governments will continue discussing climate change and solutions to it, is scheduled to take place in Peru in December of this year. The Global Movement for Tropical Forests (MMBT), with the participation of 40 countries, is preparing to present the failures and deficiencies of the REDD and REDD+ programs. Brazil has been one of its principal fields for research, since this country is home to most of continuous tropical rainforests in the world, and contains around 20% of the animal and plant species on the planet.

In 2007 and in COP 11, which took place in Montreal, climate change was considered a central issue and thus it was argued that it was necessary to reduce greenhouse gas emissions using the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation program, better know by its English initials as REDD.

REDD is the platform for a new market for the exchange of carbon credits, or pollution permits, by the world’s corporations that produce carbon dioxide emissions. Through the Kyoto Protocol a cap on CO2 emissions was put into place by corporations and signatory countries, however they have the possibility to continue polluting if they invest in what is called Clean Development Mechanisms—such as the controversial wind farms or hydroelectric dams.

Another option that they have is to buy carbon credits from other corporations that are investing in conservation or reforestation programs, such as the REDD program. But to negotiate these types of credits, it is necessary to have intact forests since the trees function as a carbon sink and release oxygen into the atmosphere. The so-alled “pollution permits” allow industries to continue to pollute while “offsetting” their emissions by  paying so that in another part of the world they stop cutting down forests and reforest.  This is the system created for compensating for CO2 emitted in the production processes of big industry, or by corporate agribusiness or livestock farming.

“There is speculation around the price of these carbon credits in the stock market since they tend to increase when pollution levels increase and the forests are not sufficiently able absorb the carbon dioxide emitted by big industry,” says Winne Overbeek from MMBT.

There are two types of carbon markets: those of enforced regulation and voluntary ones. The regulated market is the one that corporations and governments use and through which, by law, they must report their greenhouse gas emissions. The second is the voluntary market, which includes all the credit transactions of carbon offsets that are not subject to regulatory obligation, with the goal of reducing overall emissions, such as the one in Brazil.

The private sector can buy carbon credits directly from corporate projects or from the carbon funds such as the World Bank’s BioCarbon Fund, which includes representation from the capitals of Norway, the U.S. and the United Kingdom, who have mobilized financing for activities that sequester carbon emissions in forest and agricultural systems, such as the new initiative where 280 million dollars have been designated for the so-called, “Sustainable Forest Landscapes,” whose principal objective is to back the productive sector of livestock farming and so-called “intelligent agriculture.”

Monte Pascoal is a small accident of geography, with an altitude of 536 meters, located on the outskirts of the city of Itamaraju, municipality in the state of Bahía, in Brazil. It was the first piece of land seen by Pedro Álvares Cabral in April in the year 1500, when the Portuguese landed on Brazilian soil. According to the official history, the hill is a landmark in the “discovery” of Brazil. For the Pataxo people, who have inhabited this place for hundreds of generations, it marks the beginning of the destruction of their territory.

Nomacaxhi Pataxo, with certainty, affirms that the Pataxo culture was born in this territory. “Our grandparents lived here long before, and it was they who taught us to live with the forest, because it is our house and because it is where we eat. We have been here since before the arrival of the Portuguese.”

Just as first waves of European colonization in Brazil arrived to this particular region, now in this same Pataxo territory, a new type of colonization is arriving with the REDD project. The project for forest carbon offsets has been sold as a pilot project for the financing for the restoration of “degraded” forests through the sale of carbon credits.

The MMBT launched a first report based on a study that was carried out in 2013 about the impact and evolution of the project in the region, carried out by Jutta Kill. According to the MMBT report, the big international conservation non-profit organizations and regional conservation groups have promoted the initiative of designating ecological corridors in the Atlantic Forests, originally proposed by the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment, with the support of the World Bank. The objective is to create an ecological corridor between the parks of Monte Pascoal and Pau Brasil, some 60 kilometers away from one another, forming the Ecological Corridor of Monte Pascoal-Pau Brazil.

The giant conservation NGOs, such as Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy also participated in the development of a conservation project in this time period and designated funds for part of the initiative. Financial contributions were also received from eucalyptus plantation corporations, Veracel and Aracruz, facilitated by the group IBIO, which has close ties to Veracel, which owns more than 100 thousand hectares of eucalyptus trees planted in the extreme southern part of Bahía. During the 1990s the activities of Veracel were suspended due to their involvement in deforestation activities.

The Nature Conservancy, according to the study, has proposed the inclusion of a carbon offset component of approximately 1,000 hectares in an initiative to conserve a total of 24,000 hectares. In 2008, 17 hectares were restored as part of a carbon offset contract with Kraft Foods, a global food production company and corporate partner of Conservation International. In 2009, a carbon contract was signed for 30 years with Natura Cosmetics, for the restoration of 250 hectares of “degraded territories” which would sequester 316 tons of CO2.

Photo by Santiago Navarro F

In 2010, the carbon-offset project was announced as the first forest restoration project in Brazil after having received a climate certification called Community and Biodiversity. This standard is used by many REDD projects and others of forest carbon compensation as evidence of the social and environmental benefits that the project supposedly should provide. The Monte Pascoal Forest Restoration project was awarded the Climate, Community and Biodiversity (CCB) Gold Level. The objective of the CCB standards is to indicate that a project offers other social benefits, beyond the minimum requirements of certification.

What is left for communities?

One of the objectives of this project is to provide “valuable technical skills, employment, and income to local communities,” states the MMBT document. At least three Pataxo towns have been involved in the reforestation project.

Cooplantar–a local cooperative formed with the objective of carrying out the reforestation effort, of planting trees and doing maintenance work for the Monte Pascoal project–plays an important role in justifying the expedition of the CCB gold level certification, states the report. “And while the initiative without a doubt has provided a little bit of training and skills in the planting and maintenance of trees, and, at the beginning, some employment and income, many of the members of the cooperative were unemployed at the time of the research [in 2013], and others had begun to take jobs as day laborers on cattle farms, coffee and cayenne pepper plantations, or in the tourism industry.”

Another problem found by the study is the lack of understanding by the local community involved in the project with regard to the allocation of forests that serve as a carbon sink, their commercialization and who comes out ahead within this market.

The Monte Pascoal project of carbon compensation is linked to the carbon contract of 250 hectares with Natura Cosmetics, according to the information gathered, and can be found currently in the “waiting phase” section. At the completion of the report, only 56 hectares of the 250 that were contracted had been re-established.

The project, according to MMBT, had difficulties when the Forestry Code of the country was modified in 2012, reducing the obligations of private landowners to restore forests. As a result, the owners lost interest in offering their lands to be restored as part of the compensation project.

Brazil in REDD

Brazil is also one of the research fields of the initiative REDDX, which has undertaken a wide range of research around modes of financing the conservation of forests, investment and the commercialization of sustainable forest products. According to the data documented by REDDX, between 2009 and 2011, there was a financing flow for REDD projects in Brazil to the order of $598,604,833 US dollars.

The study generally lays out the most relevant players that structure this flow, including donors such as the World Bank, the UN Environment Program, the multilateral institutions. Resources are channeled through government agencies, as in the case of Germany using the German national development bank KFW, the Agency of German International Cooperation—GIZ, Norway, the United Kingdom—FCO, United States—USAID and private foundations such as Moore, Ford, Packard, Climate Works, Petrobras, among others.

“Most of the money, based on what we were able to map out, goes to consulting companies that do the inventory of carbon in the forests and do the carbon monitoring. The smallest part goes to the communities. Many things are promised in the name of sustainable development, but the experience has been that they are not fulfilled. Indigenous people are not pushed out, they end up as workers in this new marketplace,”

SAYS OVERBEEK.

According to the member of MMBT there is little information about how the articulation between the different actors regarding the implementation of projects works, nor about their results. The REDDX initiative addresses the lack of clarity around the project on its website. “The financial commitments at a high level (multilateral, bilateral, or governmental), continue to be limited in terms of the information regarding exactly how much money is really flowing to the countries, the types of activities financed by REDD+ during this initial period and the organization actually developing and implementing these activities.”

“We are in a transition phase from which the idea of REDD was launched. We calculate that there are between 200 and 300 projects total in the world. They are still pilot projects. We are seeing an effort on the part of governments, corporations and big conservation non-profits to invest more and more in these types of projects in different countries,” says Overbeek, and offers the case of Mozambique as an example. ‘They are already dividing up 60% of the national territory for this type of project. The state of Acre, in northern Brazil, is also organized so that the entire territory is transformed into an area of environmental business services, they are even creating specific legislation for it.”

One thing is certain, assures the member of the MMBT: the position of governments, corporations and non-governmental organizations is to increase investments in these lucrative projects in the forests that still exist around the world.

“They are going to continue earning money in the same way in which they always have, exploiting the nature environment, and on the other hand, continue with the process of the accumulation of these mechanisms of ecosystem services. The prediction is that they will have complete control over the forest areas, including protected areas, the National Parks, Peace Parks, among other concepts that they use.”

The historic caretakers of the forests are the most affected

What the MMBT has observed across the world is a process of the criminalization of small towns and communities of native people that live in the forests. “The use of the forests by the traditional peoples appears in the preliminary studies of the REDD projects across the world as a primary cause of deforestation. Above the levels that have been caused by big corporations,” affirms Overbeek.

Organizations such as WWF, CI, and TNC, backed by the United Nations, encourage  conservation in such a way that native people lose their autonomy and self-determination over their own territory. “These organizations are the ones that have driven the policies, along with governments, to create the national parks. These are the NGOs that oversee these projects and they are the ones who end up being the principal actors in this market,” argues the researcher from MMBT.

Jutta Kill affirms that, “Conservation International, for example, has raised over 3 billion dollars, promising to save valuable places. Beyond the conservation of the land, they have been involved in the extraction of petroleum, logging, and development. BP, Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Shell are represented on their board of directors.”

For a long time, indigenous people have used the method of growing crops best known as itinerant, migratory or nomadic agriculture, or of slash and burn. This form of subsistence agriculture practiced in vast regions and in the vegetation of the forest of tropical rainforests. Indigenous people open a clearing in the vegetation, burning the trees, so that the ashes can be integrated into the soil. “This has been the reason they’ve been criminalized. We at the MMBT have fought hard to denounce this conception of conservation. We have forests because there have been people conserving the forests and they have been the indigenous people, but the non-profit organizations have considered them as enemies of conservation, they have been driven out in the name of conservation.”

Overbeek emphasizes that the principal cause of climate change has been and continues to be the burning of fossil fuels, present in all the chains of production of merchandise. “Deforestation is being used to distract attention from the real cause of the problem, since deforestation is responsible for 15% of global carbon emissions and after this deforestation is agribusiness, real-estate development, and livestock farming.”

For decades, the processes of destruction that the extractive industry and phases of merchandise production produced were called “market failures” or “negative externalities.” “The carbon market and principally the REDD program came about in a context of economic and ecological crises that are one and the same, and do not seek to confront the causes of the problem, but instead see it as an opportunity to continue earning profits,” argues Overbeek.

No response

The Americas Program reached out to Conservation International and the Nature Conservancy to clarify questions such as the implementation of the carbon offset program in the Monte Pascoal-Pau Corridor in Brazil, their operations in Brazil, how they work with indigenous groups in the region of Monte Pascoal, who benefits from the REDD project and if the indigenous groups will be able to use the areas the are being reforested, since they are now natural conservation areas.

Neither of the Brazilian offices of the two international organizations responded to the request, stating that they did not have the time.

Published in Americas Program

As Men Emigrate, Indigenous Women Gain Political Opportunities and Obligations in Mexico

The emigration of men to the United States threatens indigenous systems of governance in Mexico. When men leave, the weight of activities in small towns falls on women, but despite this women are still fighting for space in the political arena.

The system of "uses and customs" that governs 418 of the 570 municipalities in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico is based on social and traditional political practices in indigenous communities, founded on community work and assemblies that elect authorities, parallel to the party-based election system. However, these practices have faced a persistent enemy since the 1960s: emigration. In a collective system, the continual departure of large portions of a community takes a real toll on politics and lives, and the flow of people away from Oaxacan lands is leaving behind gaps in the towns' social and political organizations.

The Institute for Migrant Assistance (IOAM) estimates that around 2 million Oaxacans live in the United States; the population of the entire state is 3.1 million. In 2010, 98 out of every 100 migrants that left Mexico went to the United States. The figure on a national level is 89 of every 100 individuals. The majority of immigrants are indigenous and work as day laborers in agriculture, construction, domestic service, in restaurants, and as cleaners, gardeners and laborers. They are concentrated in Los Angeles, Houston, Dallas, Chicago, San Antonio, San Francisco, Phoenix, Fresno, Sacramento and Tucson.

According to the National Institute of Statistics and Geography (INEGI), of the 570 municipalities that make up Oaxaca, the municipality of San Juan Quiahije in the coastal region and San Bartolome Quialana in the Central Valleys are, respectively, the top two towns within the national context with the highest levels of migration.

"Oaxaca is the second-poorest state in Mexico. The minimum wage in Mexico is approximately 49.50 Mexican pesos per eight-hour day of work. In Oaxaca there are far too many people who earn less than the national minimum wage," according to the Migrant Counseling Center of Oaxaca's website. To make matters worse, when the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994, imported corn became 30 percent cheaper than local corn, which is the basis of the indigenous diet. This caused the emigration of small-scale farmers away from rural regions. The result has been the "abandonment of the countryside and rural areas and the loss of cultural traditions," according to the website.

Women from the Mixtec region of Oaxaca on their way to participate in a tequio - unpaid collective work done for community benefit. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F.)

Political Awakening

Migration away from the region has historically been predominantly male. According to INEGI, of every 10 emigrants from Oaxaca, eight were men. There are many reasons women stay behind. The risk of death in the desert or during river crossings that are required to get into the United States without documentation is one of them. The responsibility of raising children, taking care of the land and providing for the family also fall to women, especially given that they do not always receive remittances from the husband who leaves. This has also brought consequences for women who historically only participated in domestic activities within communities governed by "uses and customs."

"When the men leave, women stay and then begin to fulfill their designated cargos in schools, in community projects, in community service; even the responsibility for the survival of the household falls on women," said Carmen Alonso Santiago, an indigenous Zapotec woman and director of the non-governmental organization Flor y Canto (Flower and Song). For her, the necessity of assuming cargos (volunteer community service positions) and roles within the community is one of the principle ways that women begin to deepen their political participation. In this way, the departure of men brings greater obligations for women, but also opens greater possibilities and opportunities for the strengthening of women's emancipation in communities.

Gaining a Voice

Teotitlán del Valle is a Oaxacan town governed by "uses and customs." It has 8,000 inhabitants with a deeply-rooted tradition of weaving wool. The colorful tapestries and the clothes for cold weather are well-known in different parts of Mexico. Historically, everything was done within an artisan system, from the washing of the wool to the creation of dyes; the tradition is to make natural dyes using flowers, fruit, leaves and tree bark. Things have changed somewhat recently - some weavers use chemical dyes, for instance, but most retain the traditional methods. In large part, pieces are woven to reflect the legends and history of the community. There is no house without at least one loom and the art of weaving is taught to children beginning at the age of 10.

Seventeen years ago, a group of women from Teotitlán decided to form a cooperative, Vida Nueva. "We came together purely out of necessity. We sold our rugs to middlemen, but the pay was very low. We were single women, widows, wives of men who had emigrated. We had to provide for our families," Pastora Gutiérrez Reyes, one of the founders of the cooperative, told Truthout. "There is a lot of emigration. In the 1940s, our grandfathers started to leave, then our fathers, our brothers: The young men finished middle school and then left. Our group formed as a way to find options for work. That's how we started to work in the fields and to weave," she said.

Now, beyond just working in the cooperative, they also participate in political work with other women in the community. "We promote workshops on sexuality, health, self-esteem, and against the use of drugs," Reyes said. "In the beginning of the cooperative they criticized us a lot. Can you imagine a group of women organizing ourselves 17 years ago? Women couldn't even leave the town."

As their work grew stronger, a moment arrived when the women of the cooperative took the initiative to introduce themselves to the local authorities. "Slowly, they began to take us into account as a group of women. We began to participate in the assemblies. Other women began to see our participation. Slowly, more women came, mainly those who had husbands outside the country or who were widows," Reyes recalled. "We are now taken into consideration in the social and political realms. When there are official or political events, we are invited by the local authorities. Women can now have cargos. Men saw how women organized themselves and how their political work has good results. Today, there is a little more equality."

Limited Political Life

The "uses and customs" system has been valorized and defended by communities for centuries. When their territory is threatened, it is defended by men, women, the elderly, even children. But the political participation of women, although it has grown, is still minimal within this system. To get an idea of these low levels of participation in the state of Oaxaca, according to the State Electoral Institute of Citizen Participation in Oaxaca, during the 2014 elections, women participated in "uses and customs" systems at a rate of 1.68 percent and in political party systems at a rate of 5.2 percent.

Carmen Alonso Santiago, the director of Flor y Canto, points out that in different communities, the conditions for women vary widely because everything is based on what is determined by the "uses and customs" of each town. "There are communities where women fight for their rights, and others where they don't as much," Santiago told Truthout. "There are communities where currently it is not permitted for a woman to be elected as an authority and in other communities, there is no discrimination. In others, women are not taken into consideration to even raise their hands in the assemblies and fulfill their role in other ways. But there are other places where for many years women have participated in assemblies, voting and being counted."

Mapping the Participation of Women

Mexico's National Human Rights Commission, in its publication titled "Political Participation of Women in Mexico," based on the elections in October 2007, mapped the participation of women in the cargo system in municipalities governed by "uses and customs." This year, 361 municipalities were registered as part of the "uses and customs" system.

The inquiry demonstrates that there are several combinations of criteria that determine which women vote. In 234 municipalities (62.7 percent), all women can vote, single, married and widowed; in 59, women are not allowed to vote (15.8 percent); in 15, only married women can vote; in 5, only widows; in 10, only single women; and in 7, only single women and widows are allowed to vote. Forty-eight municipalities did not give statistics.

Zapotec girl from the valleys of Oaxaca gives a presentation in an event for the defense of native corn. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F.)

Women are part of the city council - either as members or in some rare cases as mayors - in 21 municipalities (5.6 percent). Only 48 municipalities (12.9 percent) have women members of the municipal administration as treasurers, secretaries, auditors and in administrative commissions, such as those for potable water.

Women participate more as members of committees - they appear in 195 municipalities (52.3 percent) - that have been formed through the initiatives of public institutions, such as the comprehensive development of the family, institutions in the health and education sectors, and in social programs combatting poverty. The participation of women in these types of committees is more readily accepted because they are seen as an extension of the roles women already fulfill in the domestic sphere. As committee presidents, they appear in 14 municipalities (3.8 percent) only.

Women in Cargos

Fifty-six municipalities (15 percent) register that women fulfill obligatory cargos in the following categories: religious and traditional, such as those in charge of the temple, catechists, and sometimes even serving as police, although in only six municipalities are police positions given as cargos to women.

In 64 municipalities (17.2 percent) community serviceis obligatory for women. While cargos are carried out by individuals authorized by the assembly, community service is a one-time activity that the whole community participates in, generally occurring on important days such as during festivals or collective community work (tequio).

In 42 municipalities (11.3 percent), women do services during traditional festivities; in 12 municipalities (3.2 percent) women are the organizers of such festivities. Another 31 municipalities (8.3 percent) decide the community service of women in diverse community tequios, from cleaning public spaces, churches, communal spaces, and as promoters for community programs.

According to the Human Rights Commission's report, the low political participation and presence of women within local government structures can be explained through two factors, and the contrast between the official report and the nuanced personal experiences women describe is marked. According to the report, "The structural nature of this social inequality is reflected in a rate of human development that is almost 15 percent lower than the non-indigenous population, due to the prevalence of 'uses and customs' that exclude the participation of women at high rates."

Furthermore, the report states that women's participation "in public municipal spaces can be seen as an extension of their roles in the private space of home and family, given that their roles are connected to family and procreation: education, health, collective consumption services (mills, milk stores); the same institutions that develop programs for social benefit always require this type of 'participation' by women in the community sphere."

Verónica Vázquez García, a professor in the postgraduate college in Texcoco, Mexico, who researched women's political participation in the system of "uses and customs," wrote, "women realize innumerable tasks necessary for community development, but are rarely recognized and have little decision-making power . . . The traditional gender roles not only do not change, but are reproduced daily. Women rarely rise to positions of power. Much work is needed in order to topple, one by one, these forms of discrimination that are deeply rooted in the political life of each municipality."

Rights Guaranteed by Law

On August 3, 2011, Oaxacan Congresswoman Eufrosina Cruz Mendoza, as president of the Directive Body of the State Congress, presented a constitutional reform initiative in Congress that would guarantee the active and passive right to vote for women in municipalities governed by "uses and customs" and would take steps to create a Board of Equality and Gender in all of the state's local councils. The proposal was approved on April 28, 2011.

In the State Congress, of the 42 members of the 61st legislature, only 16 are women and of these, only Cruz Mendoza is from an indigenous municipality that is governed by "uses and customs" - Santa María Guiegolina, in San Carlos Yautepec, Oaxaca.

Cruz Mendoza was elected president of her municipality in 2007 and the results were nullified based on traditional laws that stipulated that women cannot be elected to that position.

Zapotec women from the Isthmus. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F.)

The Construction of Daily Life

The system of "uses and customs" is much more than a system of cargos, of electing authorities, of decisions made by assembly. It is based on the construction of a daily life in which the role of women is fundamental. "We are talking about their own ways of living in community, of relating to one another, of educating our children, of working the land, of preparing our food, of relating to the natural world, of fighting against those who would exploit our lands. And women are present in all of these processes," Santiago said.

She defined what has permitted communities to maintain their "uses and customs" over time. "I feel that we have deep roots as an indigenous town, which has changed over time, it's true, but that is still very rooted in our values, in solidarity, brotherhood, in community work. And all this is transmitted with education and women are the principle teachers."

Santiago remembers the decisive entry of her grandmothers in the system of "uses and customs" although they didn't participate in the cargo system. "The grandmothers did not participate in assemblies, didn't speak Spanish, but have always been the advisers of the community, with their sensitivity, their intuition," she said. They were sought after to resolve internal marriage problems. They were recognized. When a mayor was elected, the authority came with his spouse, his children, to the house to talk with the grandmothers. And they called other grandmothers who were also highly respected. And the women gave their advice to the mayor and told him how he had to behave.

María Isabel Jiménez Salinas, who lives in the Isthmus of Tehúantepec and is part of the Peoples' Popular Assembly of Juchitán, told Truthout that women, like men, work to sustain life. "Around here, men fish at night, bring the fish in the morning, and women sell the fish during the day. The men rest while women sell the product. And the small-scale farmers work the land and the women make and sell the products."

In the daily life of these communities, there is equal participation of men and women, as in the sowing and in the harvest, Santiago said. The roles of communal living and survival are well-defined. "Now, slowly, political participation is drawing near. It is women who are pushing a process to raise their level of participation."

Communal Lands: Theater of Operations for the Counterinsurgency

In 2006, a team of geographers from the University of Kansas carried out a series of mapping projects of communal lands in southern Mexico's Northern Sierra Mountains. Coordinated by Peter Herlihy and Geoffrey B. Demarest, a US lieutenant colonel, the objective was to achieve strategic military and geopolitical goals of particular interest for the United States. The objective was to incorporate indigenous territories into the transnational corporate model of private property, either by force or through agreements. Demarest's essential argument is that peace cannot exist without private property.

"The Bowman Expeditions are taking places with the counterinsurgency logic of the United States, and we reported them in 2009. These expeditions were part of research regarding the geographic information that indigenous communities in the Sierra Juarez possess. The researchers hid the fact that they were being financed by the Pentagon. And we believe that this research was a type of pilot project to practice how they would undertake research in other parts of the world in relation to indigenous towns and their communal lands",

SAID ALDO GONZALES ROJAS IN AN INTERVIEW WITH TRUTHOUT. A DIRECTOR FOR THE SECRETARY OF INDIGENOUS AFFAIRS IN THE STATE OF OAXACA, ROJAS ENSURES THAT INDIGENOUS LAWS ARE BEING INSTITUTED AND APPLIED CORRECTLY IN THE STATE.

According to researcher and anthropologist Gilberto López y Rivas, "The agents on the expeditions consider the types of communal property in these lands, both collective and autonomous, to be an obstacle for the development plans currently being very aggressively executed, where there is capital from mining companies, pharmaceuticals, energy companies, among others", he told Truthout. This is despite the fact that these communal lands in Mexico, for example, were recognized after the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and are lands that indigenous communities have possessed since time immemorial.

Geographer and University of Colorado professor Joe Bryan, affirmed in an interview with Truthout, that, as a point of reference in this offensive against communal lands, the Southern Command of the United States military, one of the 10 command units belonging to the US military that are deployed across the world, covers the area from South America, Central America, to the Caribbean. "They have turned their gaze to see that there is no state presence and an absence of private property. They are looking for communal areas and present these areas as belonging to drug trafficking and organized crime groups. In this way the Southern Command is looking to become a partner with the governments and nonprofit organizations in Latin America, and with this in mind, for example, that operation called Continuous Mission - that promotes health services to communities - [is] another way of occupying territories and of counterinsurgency."

As the ideologue of these expeditions, Demarest considers collective land ownership to be the birthplace of delinquency and insurgency, and thus believes that collective property must be destroyed. He graduated from the School of the Americas, which is under the administration of the US Army and was founded in 1946 in Panama, with the objective of training Latin American soldiers in war and counterinsurgency tactics. In recent years, graduates from the School of the Americas have participated in assassinations in Colombia, formed part of the drug trafficking organization The Zetas, in Mexico, and were involved in the coup in Honduras in 2009, as was demonstrated by activists through a School of the Americas Watch lawsuit against the Department of Defense in February 2013. "Demarest is one of the coordinators of these expeditions. He was trained in the School of the Americas, later served as military attaché for the United States Embassy in Guatemala in 1988 and 1991, where a counterinsurgency project was implemented that caused terrible massacres of indigenous populations," says López.

In Oaxaca, a caravan of activists arrives to support those resisting the construction of the wind farm, in the face of more than 500 policemen attempting to take control of the territory. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F.)

The Counterinsurgency Manual

According to the May 2014 publication of the Army Manual of the United States (FM-3-24, MCWP-3-33.5), which outlines the strategic ways to break up any type of insurgency, in the section titled "Insurgencies and Counterinsurgencies," when certain elements within the population grow dissatisfied with the status quo and are willing to fight to change conditions to be in their favor, using both violent and nonviolent means to effect change in the prevailing authority, these are the conditions that lead to insurgencies.

In this same sense, this manual was made to counteract any type of insurgency using different methods and in collaboration with what the manual calls "Unified Action Partners", a collaboration of integrated effort that goes from national companies or multinational ones and government organizations and NGOs, to the presence of intergovernmental organisms such as the United Nations. "Regional organizations like the Organization of American States and the European Union or international organizations like the United Nations may be involved in some counterinsurgency operations. The United Nations, in particular has many subordinate and affiliate agencies active worldwide", states the manual's text.

In Oaxaca, a police officer takes pictures, attempting to document the presence of activists in Oaxaca's Triqui indigenous region. (Photo: Santiago Navarro F.)

The Counterinsurgency Academy

"Each year the Minerva Initiative, with Pentagon funding, looks to map 59 indigenous towns in Central America and gives prizes to 12 of the 300 projects that are presented. In 2013, it awarded a project that was going to take place in Honduras with the backing of the National Pedagogical University Francisco Morazán, employing as research assistants people of indigenous and mixed descent to map zones of communal property in order to destroy or annihilate them",

SAYS LÓPEZ.

In 2013, the US Department of Defense approved a budget allocation of 1.5 million dollars, with the possibility of increasing it to 3 million, for Jerry Dobson and other researchers to continue with the Bowman Expeditions, now a program with the Minerva research initiative. "The Minerva Initiative is a consortium that moves in relation to the Pentagon's interests and contacts the best universities in the United States and subsumes Latin America Universities that offer to receive funds from the department of military studies of the Pentagon in order to carry out research for the counterinsurgency," explains López.

There are at least 12 research projects with Pentagon financing under the guidance of the Minverva Initiative to collect data for the counterinsurgency effort. "Another project under the direction of the Minerva Initiative is the megaproject of the University of Washington, in collaboration with Harvard, that looks to study the origin, characteristics and implications of political movements in 23 countries, relying on a database of 58 countries provided by the Minerva Initiative, looking to construct a map of the movements in space and time," says López.

In February 2012, elements of the Mexican army enter the autonomous community of Cheran in Michoacan, despite not having permission. (Photo: Heriberto Paredes)

Breeding Ground for Indigenous Movements

The "reforms" recently approved in Mexico, which include the privatization of education and petroleum resources, as well as drastic changes to Mexico’s financial sector, will have a direct impact on more than 80 million Mexicans, especially considering that 40 percent of spending in the public sector is financed using income from Mexican Petroleum (PEMEX). These reforms create a potential breeding ground for the intensification of new social movements in the country. Although usually pacifist in nature, historically such movements have been labeled as insurgent.

In just three federal administrations, almost the same amount of land has been conceded to mining companies as was distributed after the Mexican Revolution in 1910. Over 94 million hectares have been conceded, and a large number of these concessions are located in indigenous territories, where people were not informed of that fact. In December of 2013, Jaime Martínez Veloz, Commissioner for a Dialogue with Indigenous Towns of Mexico, warned that this situation, promoted by the governments of Ernesto Zedillo, Vicente Fox,and Felipe Calderón could provoke social confrontations in the affected regions.

The reform to the hydrocarbon law gives a free pass to transnational corporations looking to expropriate territories, through what is referred to in article 33, for public use - and this includes communal lands. Communities have jurisdiction only of up to 30 centimeters beneath the soil: beyond that, it belongs to the federal government. "It opens the door to the expropriation of lands of course for public utility and even to biosphere reserves, as well as to a series of human rights violations," was one of the positions in the debate over article 33 in the words of Senator Zoé Robledo.

During the first 16 months of the presidential term of Enrique Peña Nieto, these reforms have been accompanied by a rise in the criminalization of activism and social struggle in this country. Disappearances and forced detentions are now "unquantifiable". "From here we say to Peña Nieto that it will not be possible for him to decide for us, because our towns are organized; we have decided that they can kill us, but we are not ceding our land to anyone," says Felipe Flores, who together with other indigenous communities opposes the construction of a hydroelectric dam called La Parota, in Mexico's southern state of Guerrero.

For López, social struggles are taking place in a context of militarization and counterinsurgency, where one sees the presence of an authoritarian state that uses selective violence, as it did during the dirty war in the 1960s and '70s, with enforced disappearances, incarceration and persecution.

In Cherán, Michoacán, La Ronda Comunitaria is an effort that seeks protections for indigenous autonomy, based on the principle, "Only the people defend the people".(Photo: Heriberto Paredes)

Irregular Warfare

Indigenous communities, where one can find the support bases of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) in Chiapas, Mexico, is a living example of the application of the mechanism called irregular warfare, as it is labeled in counterinsurgency manuals. "It is not low-intensity warfare, but a war of comprehensive wearing-down, which goes from the co-opting of communities with government assistance programs, which according to the counterinsurgency is taking the water away from the fish. But it also creates angry fish who are at the service of the state that then attack insurgent fish, or, paramilitary groups from the same community, who are the ones that perpetrated the most recent attack against the Zapatista Movement, a movement that has not undertaken a single offensive action in the last 20 years, because they decided to opt for the road of support for the autonomy of their communities", says López.

Oaxaca, at Risk for Insurgency

Since the armed uprising of the EZLN in 1994 and since the signing of the 1996 San Andrés Accords regarding indigenous rights and culture, a large majority of the indigenous towns in Mexico have echoed the demands of these accords. Oaxaca, as a majority indigenous state, generated concern for the governor at the time, Diodoro Carrasco Altamirano, and then-president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo, who opted to implement a policy of indigenous containment with a series of constitutional reforms elaborated by the Center for Government Studies of Oaxaca. It used the same counterinsurgency tactics implemented by the School of the Americas, which since 1953 and until 1996 had received close to one thousand military police from Mexico to take training courses, principally regarding counterinsurgency techniques, according to one of the chapters of a historical report of the Special Prosecution for Social and Political Movements of the Past (FEMOSPP).

That is why in 1996, due to these counterinsurgency tactics, political actions were implemented across the state of Oaxaca to co-opt and buy off social leaders. Intelligence and paramilitary groups were created, such as the so-called "Delivery Crew" in the Loxicha region, a group paid by bosses whose most important task is betrayal: They turned in presumed guerrilla fighters and tortured, selectively assassinated, raped women and made arbitrary detentions. Of the over 150 indigenous individuals detained during that time, in the year 2012, there were still seven prisoners, known as the Loxicha prisoners.

In 2006, during the term of Ulises Ruis Ortiz, over 2 million people spilled into the streets to ask for the removal of the governor. Since then, counterinsurgency tactics have been constantly reworked in this region of the country. Since this period, the city of Oaxaca is one of the most monitored cities in the world, with C4 intelligence technology, with more than 230 cameras that form part of a Command, Control, Computers, Communications Center (C4), that, among other activities, does not just film and capture information in each of the monitored areas, but is also capable of facial recognition, and of recognizing gestures and physical features, supported by deaf-mute individuals that analyze every movement caught on film.

In a war, battlegrounds are defined and an enemy is identified that must be reduced or controlled. In this case, it appears that indigenous towns have been identified by governments and corporations as a potential enemy - which in turn threatens the conservation of communal territories and autonomous self-governance. Meanwhile, in stark contrast to the bellicose and destructive power of governments and corporations, in indigenous towns' struggles, resistance and community cohesion are the principle weapons.