View previous stories
	Latin America’s Environmental Defenders find themselves in the Crosshairs by Ana Paula Hernández The Fund for Global Human Rights   February 2017   On January 15, Isidro Baldenegro, a prominent environmental leader and a 2005 recipient of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, was shot and killed in his home state of Chihuahua, Mexico. Baldenegro was a farmer and a community leader of Mexico’s indigenous Tarahumara people, defending forests from devastating logging in a region characterized by violence, corruption, and drug trafficking.   This deadly start to 2017 echoed a brutal murder almost one year earlier, on March 2, 2016, when environmental human rights defender Berta Cáceres was slain in her home in La Esperanza, Honduras. As the founder and coordinator of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras, Cáceres had led a decade-long fight against the building of the Agua Zarca Dam along the Gualcarque River, a project that threatened the livelihoods of hundreds of indigenous Lenca families. She received the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015.   Cáceres’s murder was a wake-up call to other environmental human rights defenders across the Americas: if this could happen to such a well-known activist, then it could happen to anyone.   Environmental defenders, whose work often includes land and resource rights, the rights of indigenous communities, and both state and nonstate threats to healthy environments, are among the human rights defenders most at risk.   In his recent report, the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders warns that the “shocking rate” of killings is “only the tip of the iceberg” of a disturbing trend of “increasing violence, intimidation, harassment, and demonization” of environmental human rights defenders.   Another report by Global Witness states that Latin America is the most dangerous region, and Honduras the most dangerous country, for environmental defenders. Of the 185 killed worldwide in 2015, 122 were in Latin America, while in Honduras 12 were killed in 2014 alone.   Latin American environmental defenders are under such intense threat because their activism challenges powerful economic and political interests.   The seven arrests made to date in Cáceres’s murder exposed ties between Desarrollos Energéticos, the company constructing the Agua Zarca Dam, and the Honduran military. Desarrollos Energéticos’s manager of social and environmental affairs allegedly planned Cáceres’s murder with the support of a Honduran Army special forces veteran and a retired Honduran Armed Forces military intelligence specialist.   The arrests and allegations exemplify the Honduran oligarchy’s extraordinary consolidation of power, a mere 10 families own the majority of the country’s land and businesses and include members of the political class. The military and the police, working in concert with private security forces, regularly protect private interests and silence their critics.   In Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras, environmental human rights defenders also face threats from organized crime. An InSight Crime article reveals the increasing control organized crime networks have over mining interests in Mexico, with gangs extorting payments from local and multinational mine operators, and in some cases taking full control over mining operations, using them both as a revenue source and as a money laundering mechanism.   A report from the El Salvador-based organization PRISMA exposes the role of organized crime [report in Spanish] in deforestation activities in Mesoamerica, describing how criminal groups are intensifying existing deforestation patterns by clearing forests for illegal runways and illicit rural trade routes, as well as laundering money through deforestation-related activities such as illegal logging, cattle ranching, and palm oil production. The communities that own these lands and resources are now directly threatened by organized crime networks.   As environmental human rights defenders operate in such complex contexts, strategies to ensure their safety must evolve. This involves understanding, analyzing, and documenting rights abuses and threats in ways that take into account this complexity.   Organizations, communities, and environmental defenders need a better understanding of criminal networks, corporations, and economic and political elites—and the relationships between them.   Other key aspects include gathering evidence on how states allow nonstate actors to operate with impunity, and increasing corporate transparency and accountability. Targeting the economic interests of corporations—for example, by presenting complaints to development banks that can suspend loans or conduct audits—may deter them, and the state and nonstate actors that benefit from their economic gains, from committing further abuses and attacks.   Where security threats are tied to the defense of land and resource rights, security protocols need to be collective and include community strategies. Concrete experiences in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala, and Mexico show that securing legal titles on land, supporting the recognition of community rights to natural resources, promoting community management plans of forests and resources, and strengthening monitoring systems that allow communities to better control and secure their territories are all effective measures in responding to threats to land and resource rights from organized crime.   As funders, we must move away from security and protection models that do not take into account the complexity of the contexts we now face.   This involves flexible funding that organizations, movements, and communities can use as they see necessary to ensure effective protection of and security for environmental human rights defenders. Never before has there been so much information on and attention to the threats they face. The challenge now is to translate this into concrete strategies to effectively ensure their safety.   http://www.fordfoundation.org/ideas/equals-change-blog/posts/one-year-after-her-death-berta-caceress-voice-lives-on/ Visit the related web page
	China is not the model by Juan Pablo Cardenal Equal Times   Through a combination of its own merits, the mistakes of others and a global crisis that has thrown the world off balance, China has become the big winner of globalisation. Over the last decade, whilst many countries battled with the effects of the recession and others suffered irretrievable losses, China managed to weather the crisis better than any of the world’s great powers.   Its image and, above all, its political and economic role on the international stage have since been significantly bolstered. With the crisis, China’s internationalisation went beyond guaranteeing its supply of raw materials from Africa and Latin America. Its presence is now global and far-reaching.   Its trade with the rest of the world has seen an eightfold increase since it joined the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in 2001. It has accessed Western markets ahead of forecast, buying strategic assets and the technology it was lacking. It is financing and heading hundreds of infrastructure projects throughout the developing world. And with its multi-million dollar loans, it has become the financial saviour of a good number of countries. According to the economic research firm the Rhodium Group, China’s foreign investment will reach US$20 trillion by 2020.   China’s resurgence is taking place amid signs of weakness in the West, where the evidence of economic decline is, for many, now perfectly clear. It is this economic uncertainty that has given root to the idea, in many countries, that China is crucial to our recovery and future wellbeing.   This is why there is no shortage of governments trying to accommodate China at all costs, be it by offering a favourable investment climate, avoiding political disagreements or excluding human rights from bilateral trade agendas.   This is most apparent in the developing world, where China is financing and building dams, roads, railways, football stadiums and other infrastructure. The criticism voiced in Mozambique, Zambia, Peru, Ecuador, Sudan, Burma, Angola and other countries where I have investigated the labour conditions offered by Chinese multinationals, in situ, with some honourable exceptions, is undivided.   “They offer the worst conditions of all foreign investors,” summarises a trade union activist in Zambia, where industrial strife in Chinese mining projects is routine. We are talking about low wages, limited knowledge transfer, precarious health and safety conditions and dealings between Chinese foremen and local workers that are often tantamount to maltreatment.   This is primarily owed to the fact that as the financer of many of these projects, it is China that lays down the conditions. The host state, for its part, be it due to their negligible bargaining power or because the local political elites are anxious not to damage relations with the country likely to become their main trading partner and investor, do not always require Chinese companies to comply with labour standards or the law.   In Peru, where 36 per cent of all mining investment is Chinese, the biggest projects are those generating the greatest conflict: regular strikes and violence stemming from the poor pay and safety conditions, or the social and environmental impact of their mining operations. It comes as no surprise, therefore, that the poor labour standards in Chinese projects is, probably, the one factor with the most damaging impact on China’s image abroad.   The labour, environmental and social practices of Chinese companies operating overseas are no other than a replica of the economic model in place in China. This model is a source of constant conflict.   The China Labour Bulletin (CLB), an NGO based in Hong Kong, documented 2,205 demonstrations, strikes and labour incidents in China during the first ten months of 2016, whilst pointing out that this only accounts for “about ten and 15 per cent of all incidents of workers collective action in China”.   The CLB also documented 501 work accidents in the Asian country in 2016. The problems arising from poor labour and environmental standards have, in fact, been steadily evolving over the last forty years.   So has injustice. Following Mao Zedong’s death in 1976, cheap labour was one of the five incentives, along with tax breaks, cheap land, lax environmental legislation and an undervalued yuan, that allowed Deng Xiaoping’s China (1978-1989) to attract the foreign investment deemed necessary to dismantle Maoism and move towards a market-driven economy.   The combination of cheap production and the fall in tariffs after China went on to become a member the WTO, together with the attractiveness of a potential market of hundreds of thousands of consumers, gave rise to an exodus of foreign companies to China, where they relocated part of their production.   Alongside gargantuan public investment in fixed assets, the export sector has undoubtedly been one of the engines of China’s growth, decisively contributing to its economy having grown at a rate of over nine per cent on average since 1977. But the cheap labour that continues to fuel the ‘world’s factory’, the same cheap labour that has built the infrastructure and has urbanised the new China for the last four decades, is still being kept out of the picture when it comes to the rewards of the so-called ‘Chinese miracle’.   This is sufficiently demonstrated by comparing GDP and wage growth. Whilst GDP shows an upward curve, the wage curve was practically flat until very recently.   In a more just country, part of the wealth generated would have been shared with the working class that made it possible. It would have been shared through an increase in wages, a trickling down of the wealth to these working classes. The wage increases, however, only came, and were only partial, in 2010, when the Chinese government found itself obliged to successively increase the minimum wage to ease the growing social tensions.   That same China, although now more confident in its own strengths and, perhaps, more convinced than ever about the merits of its economic model, is the country that is internationalising itself, in giant strides, across the globe.   This means that China’s investments and business operations in many countries replicate its own development model: prioritising economic growth above all else, with no regard for the side effects, no respect for standards and no time for transparency.   The perception that this model works, having lifted millions out of poverty whilst the Western liberal democratic model provides no response to the challenges of the 21st century, is leading local elites in many countries to view the Chinese model favourably. But, as seen in China, this model above all benefits the elites. And it is the most powerless who pay the price. http://bit.ly/2PoNmgC   http://clb.org.hk/ http://www.business-humanrights.org/regions-countries/asia-pacific/china Visit the related web page
	View more stories