Abstract
Anti-mining activists are risking their lives to speak out in Brazil, Mexico and Peru, reports
The extractive industries – and their devastating impact on the environment – will be on the agenda when officials convene for the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Conference in December in Spain, under the presidency of the government of Chile. But outside diplomatic circles, publicly discussing mining activities has become a perilous task in Latin America.
According to Global Witness, an environmental watchdog, mining was the deadliest sector for land defenders in 2018: 43 people were murdered after standing up to mining interests, and 11 of those killings occurred in Latin America.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN special rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, told Index that the persecution of environmental defenders did not involve just physical violence. Activists are also facing hostile rhetoric from politicians, while courts are increasingly reinterpreting laws to silence defenders.
In my visits to various parts of Latin America, I have seen an increase in harassment against land rights defenders, Tauli-Corpuz said.
For Mexican activist Isela González, this crisis is also a personal tragedy. A nurse-turned-anthropologist, González has spent more than two decades campaigning for the rights of indigenous groups living in the mountains of Chihuahua state in the country’s north-west.
The Rarámuri indigenous inhabitants of this region are struggling to defend their territory from a range of predatory outsiders, including corrupt politicians, criminal gangs and international mining companies keen to exploit the land.
González has suffered multiple death threats, despite living in a city outside the community. “It’s difficult to go out anywhere,” she told Index. “I’m always worried about people following me in the street.”
The risks are so great that González has registered in Mexico’s federal programme to protect human-rights defenders and journalists. The state provides panic buttons for her office, steel doors for her home and armed escorts to accompany her on visits to indigenous communities.
For González’s fellow campaigners within the tribal territories, the risks are even greater. In October last year, the indigenous land defender Julián Carrillo was shot dead in the mountains after years of campaigning against destructive activities such as mining. He was the sixth member of his family to be murdered in two years.
A woman protests against Brazilian mining company Vale after a dam collapsed in January 2019, which killed hundreds
CREDIT: Silvia Izquierdo/Shutterstock
As Carrillo was also enrolled in the federal protection programme, Amnesty International has concluded that the Mexican state failed to guarantee protection for his legitimate defence of his ancestral territory.
“The security provisions for the defenders in the community are totally inadequate,” González said. “They live in regions with no access to security support. They have to wait between six and 10 hours for the police to arrive.”
The presence of organised crime in the region massively compounds the dangers for defenders. But the exclusive focus on criminal gangs obscures the role of the mining companies themselves, who routinely offer extortion payments to gangs. According to Amnesty International, Carrillo spoke at a community assembly just days before his murder. He specifically voiced concern that the granting of a new mining concession on tribal territory would increase violence and criminality.
Indigenous groups in Brazil have also been rocked by a series of recent incursions into their territory. In July, dozens of armed gold-miners entered a protected Amazonian village occupied by members of the Wajãpi tribe in the northern state of Amapá. Four days earlier, Emyra Wajãpi, a local leader, had been fatally stabbed and thrown in a river in the same region. Indigenous councillors blamed the gold-miners for the murder. Randolfe Rodrigues, a state senator for Amapá, held Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, responsible.
“The Wajãpi villagers are terrified, both by the episode with Emyra and with the threats from the federal government,” said Rodrigues.
Bolsonaro has promised to open the Amazon to business. He wants to leave Convention 169 – a treaty with the International Labour Organisation – and begin mining without consulting indigenous communities.
With Bolsanaro’s position clear, illegal gold-miners and other land raiders have mobilised. According to Brazil’s Indigenous Missionary Council, a Catholic church group, 153 indigenous territories were raided in the first nine months of the year. That figure is more than double the total for the whole of 2017.
Bolsonaro has consistently portrayed indigenous groups and their supporters as anti-development. He has complained that they are encouraged to live “like animals in zoos”. He has also tried to undermine indigenous leaders by voicing doubts that Wajãpi was murdered.
“[The president’s] discourse reinforced the idea that it was all a scam,” said Charly Sanches, an environmental activist from Amapá. “Seeking to discredit indigenous people has become routine practice since Bolsonaro’s election.”
Brazil is one of the world’s deadliest countries for environmental defenders. Indigenous groups in isolated areas are particularly vulnerable to hostile rhetoric and the violence it inspires.
Confrontations involving lawyers rather than gunmen have also become common in Latin America. In Peru, authorities have begun to reinterpret laws to punish the opponents of mining projects. This August, a court sentenced Walter Aduviri, the governor of the Puno region, to six years in prison and a fine equivalent to $600,000 for his role in the protests against a mining concession in the area in 2011. Anger at the refusal to consult the Aymara indigenous community drove the protests, which led to clashes with police in which five people died. The backlash prompted the Peruvian government to cancel their concession to Bear Creek, a Canadian mining corporation.
Aduviri was eventually convicted of disturbing the peace. The 39-year-old was singled out as a “non-executive perpetrator”, suggesting he incited crimes which others carried out. In the past, this legal concept has mostly been used in cases of crimes against humanity and terrorism.
Pablo Abdo, a lawyer from the Institute for the Study of Andean Cultures in Puno, said: “Social protest revolves around three rights: freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and freedom to petition. But the law is being reinterpreted to criminalise that protest.”
Aduviri was elected governor of Puno in October last year, despite spending the campaign season as a fugitive. A judge ordered his arrest in August. Aduviri’s lawyers plan to fight the sentence on the grounds that there is no evidence linking him to any crime.
However, Abdo said the case had already discouraged other land defenders.
“Right now, there are indigenous people in Puno who are scared to assume a [leadership] role,” he said. “They are afraid that if they are visible they will be charged as criminals.”
Across Latin America, mining operations present an existential threat to the rights and freedoms of indigenous people. The UN addressed these issues for the first time in the latest report by its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report acknowledged that indigenous people offer sustainable stewardship of environmental resources. It said strengthening the recognition of these groups represented a proven strategy for slowing the climate crisis.
Alice Harrison, a spokesperson for Global Witness, said the UN report recognised that often-maligned indigenous groups offered a healthy model of existence.
“The irony is that many of these [mining operations] that are causing killings and criminalisation of whole communities are being posited as development projects,” Harrison said. “But when we talk to [indigenous] groups, they are saying: ‘What kind of development is this exactly?’”