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Amazon Indians Step Up Campaigns |
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By Danielle Knight*
Indigenous leaders are organizing mobilizations against projects to dig oil wells and develop gold mines, and in favor of curbing climate change.
WASHINGTON, Jul (IPS) - Leaders of indigenous
communities throughout the Amazon region plan to intensify their
struggle against environmental destruction and work to build on
recent political gains.
The main struggle for environmental and cultural survival in Ecuador, Bolivia and Brazil will be against oil and gas companies, particularly as they move to lay new pipelines and other infrastructure in the biologically rich rainforest region, say indigenous leaders from these countries.
"The oil companies come into our territories as if they were in their own house," says Adolfo Shacay of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of the Ecuadorian Amazon (CONFENIAE).
Shacay's organization is drawing up a set of rules on how oil companies should interact with all indigenous communities and organizations in the rainforests of Ecuador.
This, he says, is because the companies often violate the wishes of indigenous groups, circumventing them and manipulating individual villages with offers of trinkets in return for permission to explore and exploit their resources.
Groups such as Shacay's were dealt a blow in early June when Ecuador's government gave the green light to a consortium of multinational oil companies to begin construction of a 500-km petroleum pipeline.
The government says the 1.1-billion-dollar project will prove essential to jump-starting the stalled economy by moving heavy crude from the eastern rainforest region to ports on the Pacific coast. This, officials say, will enable Ecuador to double its oil production.
Conservationists, scientists, and communities along the pipeline route say that is just the problem. They argue an unprecedented boom in new oil exploration and drilling will lead to the destruction of some of the country's last remaining old-growth rainforest and isolated territories that are home to indigenous peoples.
"All the new oil exploitation is planned for indigenous territories and reserves," says Luis Yanza, president of the Ecuador-based Committee for the Defense of the Amazon. Yanza says communities plan to continue launching legal challenges to the project.
Activists in French Guiana and Suriname also are stepping up campaigns against mercury contamination caused by gold mining. Last December, communities in French Guiana filed a criminal lawsuit against the French government in which they alleged that gold mining operations have been violating environmental regulations.
"Mercury dumped into rivers has ended up in the fish, the main food source for the Wayana and Emerillon indigenous peoples," says Jocelyn Therese of the Federation of Amerindian Organizations of French Guiana (FOAG).
Mercury - used to extract gold from ore - is toxic to the nervous systems of humans and wildlife. The French government was supposed to investigate the contamination and draw up a report, but Therese says nothing has been done.
"To date, instead of prohibiting mining operations in the Wayana and Emerillon territories, the government has only advocated substituting the communities' food sources," he says. FOAG is negotiating with the government and court investigations are expected to begin shortly, according to Therese.
Martin Misiedjan, a lawyer with the Forest Peoples Program in Suriname, says Maroon communities in the Amazon rainforest are facing similar problems from small-scale gold mining. Maroons are descendants of Africans who escaped slavery and established their own communities in the hinterland.
Mercury has so contaminated remote rainforest areas, he says, that one Maroon community now has to buy potable water.
Leaders of indigenous communities throughout the region also plan to investigate the potential impacts that the Kyoto Protocol on climate change could have on their lives. The treaty, which seeks to reduce heat-trapping emissions, could have both positive and negative impacts on indigenous and local communities, says Johnson Cerda, co-director of the Amazon Alliance.
Cerda's Washington-based network organized a conference here last week that drew community leaders and advocacy groups from the nine countries of the Amazon basin to discuss environmental campaigns.
Cerda says that the Kyoto treaty's Clean Development Mechanism, for example, is a tool for industrialized countries to invest in projects in developing nations in an effort to curb so-called greenhouse gases, which scientists believe contribute to global warming.
If such ''clean development'' projects are located in the Amazon, says Cerda, they could have substantial impacts on water resources, grazing lands, soil, and forests.
For this reason, he argues, ''Indigenous peoples and other local communities need to be included in the climate change decision-making process.''
Besides sending some delegates to the upcoming treaty negotiations in Bonn, Germany, indigenous and environmental advocacy groups also plan to meet in Manaus, Brazil to discuss how communities can further influence the debate on climate change, according to Jose Adalberto Silva, with the Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (COIAB).
Many indigenous communities will continue to fight from the fringes of their countries' body politic. Others, however, have gained strategic political ground from which they are launching new efforts to reach and educate voters.
Indigenous communities are participating in national and state politics like never before, says Jose Poyo of the National Indian Council of Venezuela (CONIVE).
The new Venezuelan Constitution of 1999 and subsequent regulations have paved the way for indigenous communities to participate more in politics. Indigenous delegates can now be elected to hold three regional positions within the National Assembly as well as to hold one position within each state legislature and independent municipal council.
Last year, three delegates were elected to the National Assembly with strong records of defending indigenous peoples' rights. Six candidates supported by indigenous organizations and parties were also elected to state legislatures.
"And, for the first time in Venezuelan history, an indigenous governor and three indigenous mayors were elected in the state of Amazonas," says Poyo.
Starting with last year's election, CONIVE has been organizing workshops and making radio announcements to educate communities about how to participate in the electoral process.
To assure that candidates from indigenous communities reflect the interests and needs of the indigenous populations, Poyo says that now more than ever there is a ''heightened need for voter education among indigenous communities.''
* Danielle Knight is an IPS correspondent.
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