2012-01-09 "Revolution against “progress”: the TIPNIS struggle and class contradictions in Bolivia" by Jeffery R Webber from "International Socialism" magazine Issue: 133
[http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id=780&issue=133]
Marx says that revolutions are the locomotive of world history. But perhaps it is quite otherwise. Perhaps revolutions are an attempt by the passengers on this train—namely, the human race—to activate the emergency brake.1

In the two and a half months that passed between mid-August and late October of this year, the Bolivian government of Evo Morales entered into its worst crisis to date.2 From a high of 70 percent popularity in January 2010, Morales had plunged by mid-October 2011 to an average 35 percent approval rating across the major cities of La Paz, El Alto, Cochabamba and Santa Cruz.3 The president’s green light to a decades-old project to build a highway connecting Villa Tunari (in the department of Cochabamba) north to San Ignacio de Moxos (in the department of Beni), through the indigenous territory and national park known as TIPNIS (Territorio Indígena del Parque Nacional Isiboro-Sécure), was the catalyst of crisis in this instance.

Beginning on 15 August, lowland indigenous movements—in alliance with fractions of the highland indigenous movement, and later with the support of the urban labour movement—launched a 600-kilometre, 65-day march of protest from Beni to La Paz to prevent the construction of the highway. The march, after having been denounced by state managers as an imperialist conspiracy, and violently repressed en route by police forces on 25 September, eventually forced the Morales government to capitulate to its demands, at least temporarily. There would be no road through TIPNIS.

The bureaucratic leader of the principal highland indigenous peasant confederation (CSUTCB), Roberto Coraite, a prototypical steward of the ruling party’s interests embedded in a popular organisation, embarrassed the government by calling the lowland indigenous protesters “savages”.4 But the political fallout would run deeper still. The minister of defence, Cecilia Chacón, resigned in disgust at the police repression of unarmed protesters on 25 September. The highest echelons of the regime, Evo Morales and vice-president Álvaro García Linera, sought to distance themselves from the police raid once it proved unpopular, allowing chief of staff and minister of the interior Sacha Llorenti to take the hit for the team.

Encapsulating the tenor of the times, the so-called Pact of Unity, an eclectic coalition of various urban and rural social movements and trade unions that had lent support to the ruling Movimiento al Socialismo (Movement Towards Socialism, MAS) at different junctures since 2006, has imploded.5 It was reduced from 11 pillar organisations to merely three at its last national assembly this November, as a consequence of key lowland indigenous groups and urban labour confederations leaving en masse after having been denounced as traitors by government officials.6 The TIPNIS conflict is the most recent, and in some ways most intense, expression of the class contradictions—or “creative tensions”, as government functionaries prefer7—underlying the development model introduced by the Morales government after its assumption of power in January 2006. How did we get here?
Revolutionary moments and bureaucratic stagnation

Evo Morales was elected as Bolivia’s first indigenous president in December 2005 on the heels of a revolutionary epoch. Left-indigenous insurrection shook the city streets and countryside over the first five years of this century. Two neoliberal presidents were overthrown through mass extra-parliamentary
 mobilisation in under two years—Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada in 2003, and Carlos Mesa in 2005. A counter-power from below emerged in opposition to the capitalist state, in which the popular classes “practised that democracy that we have always wanted: direct, participatory, without intermediaries, in assemblies and councils, in the plazas, the streets, the unions, the communities, the families and the territories, deliberating, deciding and executing what we had decided”.8 The cycle of left-indigenous revolt was a combined liberation struggle for emancipation from the endemic and systematised racial oppression of the indigenous majority as well as their intricately intertwined class exploitation and subordination to imperialism through the racialised form that capitalism assumed in the Bolivian context.9

US imperialism had been militarily overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan at the time. It had also been financially weakened through the debilitation of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank on the entirety of the world stage, but particularly in Latin America, where there emerged alternative lines of credit through oil-rich Venezuela, under the presidency of Hugo Chávez. Neoliberalism had been devastated ideologically in South America in the wake of the steep recession of 1998-2002. Heads of state had been overthrown through revolts in Ecuador and Argentina. Centre-left governments in neighbouring states were asserting relative autonomy from the US, even as they encountered frequent challenges domestically through class struggle from below and to their left. The monotonous routine of neoliberal impositions over the preceding two decades was now in question. Discussion of anti-capitalism on the road blockades, in communal assemblies, in poor neighbourhoods and in union halls was now imbued with an intensity that accompanies the sense of real possibility.

The Bolivian right had retreated to its parochial geographical heartland, namely the eastern departments of Santa Cruz and Tarija, and could offer no alternative political platform to the entirely discredited neoliberal orthodoxy first introduced in 1985. Moreover, they had lost their links in the military. The social bases for the reproduction of their doctrine of free markets had eroded beneath their feet, tested as that ethos had been against the fire of Bolivian reality. The figurative rising tide that would lift all boats failed to materialise. Instead, orthodox economics meant poverty, inequality, unemployment and dispossession.

What is more, had there been a genuine possibility of a military coup in the face of left-indigenous encroachments on the reigning power structures,
 this would have occurred during the crisis of June 2005, when Mesa was clearly on his way out and key figures of the far-right in Congress wanted to assume power directly and avoid elections at any cost. The right were unable to garner sufficient support within the military to carry out their plans.

As Álvaro García Linera—current vice-president of Bolivia and erstwhile revolutionary Marxist—has explained, the 2000-5 period represented a genuine revolutionary epoch in Bolivia.10 Daniel Bensaïd summed up in a singular phrase the theorisation of such a historical moment in the works of Lenin and Trotsky: “It is defined by an interaction between several variable elements in a situation: when those above can no longer govern as they did before; when those below will not tolerate being oppressed as they were before; and when this double impossibility is expressed by a sudden effervescence of the masses”.11

Despite its impressive capacity to mobilise and its far-reaching anti-capitalist and indigenous-liberationist objectives, however, the left-indigenous bloc lacked a revolutionary party that might have provided the leadership, strategy and ideological coherence necessary to overthrow the existing capitalist state and rebuild a new sovereign power rooted in the self-governance of the overwhelmingly indigenous proletarian and peasant majority. As a consequence, the fallout of the extraordinary mobilisations and profound crisis of the state witnessed in 2000-5 was not a revolutionary transformation but a shift in popular politics from the streets and countryside to the electoral arena as elections were moved up to 18 December 2005.
Electoral sclerosis and missed opportunities

“When Morales entered office,” Forrest Hylton, one of the pre-eminent historians of modern Bolivia, has suggested, “the lowland right in Santa Cruz, Beni, Pando and Tarija was weak, divided and disorganised. Had Morales pressed his political weight to full advantage by mobilising the movements that brought him to power, he might have had the field to himself, much as Chávez has [in Venezuela].”

The approach actually adopted by the Morales government, however, was to limit any substantive confrontation with the economic power of the eastern lowland bourgeoisie, thus providing the oxygen for the right’s slow political rearticulation, and eventually its capacity to destabilise the Morales regime through extra-parliamentary street violence and racist thuggery. Over time the right obstructed the functioning of the Constituent Assembly
 (2006-8), orchestrated a massacre of indigenous peasants (September 2008), and launched an unsuccessful coup attempt (October 2008). It is notable, however, that none of this destabilisation occurred on any significant scale until two years into the Morales administration. As Hylton points out:
[begin excerpt]
between the time the Assembly was designed and concluded, the government showed its reluctance to rely on direct action from below and its willingness to make backroom concessions, to the right. As the massacre in Pando—the circumstances of which remain murky—demonstrated, in September 2008, such caution did not restrain the racist violence of the right, or prevent bloodshed, although the rightwing rampage may well have hastened the failed coup plot of October 2008, and the popular ratification of the new Constitution in January 2009.
[end excerpt]
Indeed, for Hylton, the Morales regime ultimately “gave the right an opening through which it reconstituted itself as the arbiter of the limits of social change”.12 Even as the Morales administration gifted the extreme right with an enviable opportunity for ascent, the latter managed to self-destruct soon after its rebirth. The massacre of peasants loyal to the government—carried out by right wing paramilitaries in the department of Pando in September 2008—morally repulsed most of Bolivian society, and the extreme articulations of the autonomist right wing of the lowland departments—Beni, Pando, Santa Cruz and Tarija—suffered massively as a result.

But the weakened right nonetheless managed to sap the energies of the social left in 2008 and 2009. Despite numerous sectoral disputes with the government across many different economic sectors, the popular classes in 2008 and 2009 had been consumed by the battle against the proto-fascist forces of the right, and thus no independent political organisation to the left of Morales had even begun to take shape. It was precisely in this vacuum that Morales faced re-election.

On 6 December 2009 Evo Morales won a decisive mandate for a second term in office with an astonishing 64 percent of the popular vote. The turnout was close to 90 percent.13 This latest electoral victory marked the peak of a wave of successes in the polls, including 67 percent support for his administration in the recall referendum of 2008 and 61 percent approval of the new constitution in a popular referendum held on 25 January 2009.14

The December 2009 elections represented the most profound level of institutional consolidation in the apparatuses of the state for any political force in recent Bolivian memory. Morales is the first president in Bolivia to be re-elected in successive terms, and the first to win with a larger percentage of votes when elected for a second term.15 For the first time since the 1952 National Revolution a party won a massive majority and control of both houses of the legislature, providing the MAS with the power, among other things, to reconfigure the reactionary judiciary. The MAS controls 25 of 36 Senate seats, and 82 of 130 seats in the House of Deputies.16

Morales also made important gains in the departments of the media luna, the heartland of the country’s autonomist right wing in eastern Bolivia. In Tarija, Morales actually won a majority of votes, and in Beni, Pando and Santa Cruz he increased his support substantially. Most importantly in this regard, he won 41 percent of the popular vote in the department of Santa Cruz, the principal axis of the eastern bourgeois bloc.17 In the departmental elections for governors, mayors and departmental assemblies held on 4 April 2010, moreover, the tide continued to turn in favour of the MAS. Of the nine governorships, the MAS won six (Chuquisaca, La Paz, Cochabamba, Oruro, Potosí and Pando) and lost three to right wing oppositions (Tarija, Santa Cruz and Beni). This represented a significant shift from merely three MAS governorships (Chuquisaca, Potosí and Oruro) in the 2005 departmental elections. What is more, the race was tight in Tarija and Beni, and reasonably close in Santa Cruz.18

In the wake of this decisive victory, Morales embraced a fevered rhetoric of “communitarian socialism” at home, coupled with denunciations of capitalism as the principal enemy of nature abroad. It is unsurprising on one level, then, that confusion as to what Morales represents continues to run the gamut of the political spectrum.
Murky waters

“Bolivia’s indigenous-cum-socialist revolution in the high Andes has made the country a close ally of Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, and a natural friend of poncho-wearing well-wishers in the West,” writes John Paul Rathbone in the Financial Times. “At the same time, its almost Thatcherite approach to public finances, combined with soaring prices for its gas and mineral exports, has won it praise from the International Monetary Fund”.19 Leaning heavily on the first sentiment, while tirelessly ignoring the second reality, the most militant supporters of Morales on the international left have cleaved themselves to even the most romantic self-images of the government in La Paz.

“Bolivia’s economy [sic] policy has been ‘nationalised’ and is no longer dictated by the IMF or Washington,” Australian socialist Federico Fuentes argues. Furthermore, the Morales government has taken important “steps towards decolonising the state”, and there is “little doubt that the Bolivian masses are in a far superior position to where they were five or ten years ago”.20 For Fuentes, the Morales government represents “the broad aspirations of Bolivia’s indigenous majority”, and the official refrain issued from the Presidential Palace in La Paz—that this is a “government of social movements”—is to be taken literally: “Important advances have been made by the social movements precisely because they decided to move from resistance to power”.21 The popular classes are in the driver’s seat. But a steely, realistic tone is then assumed. Fuentes acknowledges that there is “still a long struggle ahead”. In one memorable passage he both falsely attributes to me the notion that socialism can be achieved in one miraculous moment, and then plants the equally fantastical idea, if only in implicit form here, that even if Bolivia is not yet socialist, it is on the long road in that direction: “Yet one feels that none of this will be enough for Webber who would prefer they abandon their route [to socialism?] in favour of an imaginary one in which socialism is installed overnight”.22

More surprising is that these views find an echo in recent interventions made by Canadian socialist intellectual and activist John Riddell.23 Riddell recognises that “Bolivia remains capitalist, and that a socialist transformation is not underway”, but insists that the country never entered into a revolutionary situation and that there were no prospects for a transition to socialism in 2000-5, nor are there any today or presumably in the foreseeable future. Imperialism and the domestic right amount to virtually insurmountable obstacles.

Thus, against a very low bar of expectations, we can celebrate “the real achievements, the gains [the government] has made against formidable odds”, and prioritise “support of Bolivia’s positive moves towards national sovereignty, social progress and effective action on global warming”. Symptomatically, for Riddell, as for Fuentes, social movements are embodied in, and expressed through, the government of the MAS: “Despite all strains, the tie between social movements in Bolivia and the Morales government has not been broken.” Pointing to what he understands to be my misreading of the political-economic terrain in this regard, Riddell writes, “Webber’s counterposition of the masses and the MAS leadership fails to acknowledge their close relationship”.24 Elsewhere, in a less-considered formulation, Riddell goes so far as to claim—albeit with a host of important caveats—that “the government of Bolivia headed by President Evo Morales can indeed be viewed as a ‘workers’ government’ of the type discussed by the German revolutionary Clara Zetkin and the Communist International (Comintern) in the early 1920s”.25

An appraisal of the TIPNIS conflict within the wider dynamics of racialised class struggle under a political economy that shares more continuity than change with the inherited neoliberal model should, I want to argue, undermine the basis of such views. If I am correct, it does not make sense to speak of the consistent clashes between popular classes and the state as “errors” committed by the Morales administrations, but rather as systematic expressions of the necessary class commitments daily reproduced by this administration as it administers the capitalist state. “The tradition of the oppressed”, Walter Benjamin notes, “teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule”.26
TIPNIS in context

Much of the debate around TIPNIS has been curiously ahistorical. One example of this problem is straightforwardly evident in the frequent claims that the lowland indigenous resistance march of 2011—however legitimate some of its concerns—was largely conducted in the interests of the “green imperialism” of Western environmental NGOs and a destabilisation campaign against Morales, run by elements of the domestic right and funded and directed by the US government.27 Unless we attribute divine foresight to US imperialists, the logic of such accounts is difficult to marry with the historical facts of mobilisations of lowland indigenous peoples that long predated the emergence of the MAS and Morales, and thus we are asked to forget they ever existed.

Most importantly, we are to disregard the recent precedent of 700 men and women, from largely the same indigenous groups involved in the 2011 conflict, marching 400 miles from Trinidad to La Paz in 1990. The “march for territory and dignity”, as it was called, gained massive popular support and, against the wishes of the neoliberal government of Jaime Paz Zamora, won legal recognition for TIPNIS as an indigenous territory.28 Another victory of the 1990 march was the establishment of a “red line”, after which point further settlement by commercial farmers, loggers and rich peasants seeking to accumulate more land for production would be prohibited, so as to maintain the capacity of predominantly non-capitalist indigenous communities inhabiting the area to reproduce their cultural, economic, environmental and spiritual ways of life.

Just as importantly, evocations of categories such as “indigenous”, “the masses”, “the people” and “the peasantry” are employed with abundance on all sides of the debate, with precious little empirical attention paid to the class interests associated directly or indirectly with “development” in TIPNIS. It makes sense to begin our discussion, therefore, by positioning the argument within the context of transformations in Bolivia’s rural class structure in recent decades.29
Rural class structure

At the outset of the 21st century the rural class structure in Bolivia is characterised
 by a dramatic concentration of land in the hands of a few, on the one hand, and a sea of poor—often landless—peasants on the other. Haciendas (large landholdings) dominate 90 percent of Bolivia’s productive land, leaving only 10 percent divided between mostly-indigenous peasant communities and smallholding peasants.30 Roughly 400 individuals own 70 percent of productive land while there are 2.5 million landless peasants in a country with a total population of 9 million.31 Most of the peasants are indigenous, with 77 percent of rural inhabitants self-identifying as such in the 2001 census.32

Bolivia’s rural structure prior to the 1952 National Revolution was dominated by large landholdings in which “neo-feudal” social relations predominated, “based on established modes of colonial extraction and exploitation in the countryside”.33 As the nationalist-populist revolutionary process of 1952 unfolded, mass direct-action tactics and independent land occupations orchestrated by radicalised peasants in Cochabamba, La Paz and Oruro, and to a lesser extent in northern Potosí and Chuquisaca, challenged this rural class structure profoundly.34 The new revolutionary government of the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (Revolutionary Nationalist Movement, MNR) was forced to enact the Agrarian Reform Law of 1953 in response to the pressure from below. Forced labour was made illegal and haciendas in the altiplano, or highlands, (La Paz, Oruro, Potosí) and the valleys (Cochabamba, Chuquisaca, Tarija) were divided and the land redistributed, creating a new smallholding peasantry in large sections of these departments.

The MNR, though, was never a socialist party. Its interests coincided with the radical peasants only insofar as the MNR saw the breakup of semi-feudal agrarian modes of production as a prerequisite for establishing and developing a dynamic capitalist agricultural sector with ample state support. The geographic fulcrum for capitalist agriculture in Bolivia became the eastern department of Santa Cruz, beginning shortly after the revolution. Santa Cruz was relatively uninhabited at the time of the revolution and was largely unaffected by the agrarian reform. Over the next several decades it became the most dynamic centre of capitalist agriculture in the country, producing cotton, coffee, sugar and timber for export; the department also spearheaded the reconcentration of land in the hands of a few that eventually spread again throughout much of the rest of the country, reversing, through complex legal and market mechanisms, many of the reforms achieved in the National Revolution.

With the onset of neoliberalism in the mid-1980s, the agro-industrial dominance of Santa Cruz was solidified. Bolivian neoliberalism emphasised the orientation of agriculture towards exports for external markets. Transnational corporations and large domestic agricultural enterprises based in Santa Cruz led this intensified insertion into the global economy. The traditional peasant economy was increasingly displaced in various parts of the country as large agro-industrial enterprises solidified control and focused increasingly on a few select commodities, soy in particular. In 1986,
 77 percent of the total land area under cultivation was devoted to the production of cereals, fruit, vegetables and tubers in which small-scale peasant production predominated. By 2004, this area had been reduced to 48.2 percent. By one estimate, in 1963 peasant production represented 82.2 percent of the total value of agricultural production in the country, whereas by 2002 peasant production accounted for only 39.7 percent of total production, and agro-industrial capitalist production accounted for 60.3 percent of the total.35

Of the approximately 446,000 peasant production units remaining in the country today, 225,000 are located in the altiplano departments of La Paz, Oruro and Potosí, 164,000 in the valley departments of Cochabamba, Chuquisaca and Tarija, and only 57,000 in the eastern lowland departments of Santa Cruz, Beni and Pando. Capitalist relations of production now predominate in the eastern lowlands and are increasingly displacing small-scale peasant production in the valleys and altiplano although the latter continues to be the most important form of production in the altiplano.36 In the valley departments small and medium capitalist enterprises account for most of the agricultural sector. These departments play a significant role in ranching. They account for 60.3 percent of poultry production, 48 percent of pig farming and 18.5 percent of Bolivian cattle ranching. The rural altiplano, on the other hand, is still dominated by small-scale peasant producers and indigenous communities. This region accounts for only 19 percent of total cultivated land in Bolivia, and its contribution to national ranching is limited to the sheep and llama sectors.37

The rural population is diminishing throughout the country as processes of semi-proletarianisation and proletarianisation accelerate with the gradual extension of capitalist relations of production into all corners of the country. Beginning in the early 1970s, migrant labourers provided the workforce for sugarcane and cotton harvests while for the rest of the year they maintained small plots of their own land in the departments from which they primarily travelled—Cochabamba, Potosí and Chuquisaca. Between 1976 and 1996 the rural population as a proportion of the total population fell from 59 percent to 39 percent.38

This exodus has to do with two interrelated developments in the agricultural sector. On the one side, peasant production has been living through a prolonged crisis. Peasant families are increasingly unable to reproduce themselves and must supplement their farming income by selling their labour power, whether in the countryside or in the cities. In the altiplano small-scale peasant producers and indigenous communities are experiencing diminishing productive capacities of their soil, the division of land into smaller and smaller plots (minifundios) as families grow in size from generation to generation, the migration of young people to cities, and an acute absence of new technologies, making competition with foreign suppliers to the domestic Bolivian markets impossible.39 Meanwhile, in the dynamic centre of agro-capitalism in the eastern lowlands technical innovation and modernisation has led to more capital-intensive forms of agricultural production and consequently a paucity of employment opportunities even as industries expand.40

As capitalist social relations increase their reach the differentiation of the peasantry into rich, medium and poor peasants also intensifies. Survey data from 1988 suggested that 76 percent of peasantry were poor peasants, meaning they did not have the means to reproduce their family labour power based on the income generated from their land and were obliged to sell their labour power elsewhere on a temporary basis. Medium peasants constituted 11 percent of the peasantry when defined as peasant family units fundamentally based on family labour with the ability to reproduce that labour without selling their labour power elsewhere. Rich peasants—those who regularly made a profit after reproducing their family and their means of production, purchased the labour of poorer peasants, and utilised modern technology—constituted 13 percent of the peasantry.41 This process of differentiation within the peasantry has only accelerated since that time, with the transformation of some rich peasants into commercial farmers in specific regions of the altiplano and valley departments.42
Stratification of the peasantry and class dynamics

Under the government of Evo Morales, despite an uplifting discourse which valorises the poorest of peasants, actual agro-industrial production with fully capitalist social relations has expanded from 79 percent of total agricultural production in the country to 82 percent. Whereas in 2005-6 small-scale peasant production accounted for 25 percent of total production in the altiplano and valley regions, by 2008-9 this figure had dropped to 21.6 percent. While state support has been offered to agro-industrial soy producers and ranchers in the eastern lowlands, small-scale peasant production in the western highlands has been abandoned by the state.43

How are these wider rural class dynamics relevant to TIPNIS? The park encompasses 1,200,000 hectares of territory, the bulk of which is in the northern section, in the department of Beni. Northern TIPNIS is inhabited principally by three indigenous groups—the Mojeños-Trinitarios, the Chimanes and the Yuracarés. Southern TIPNIS, which borders the Chapare, a coca-producing region in the department of Cochabamba, is inhabited principally by Quechua and Aymara peasants—also known as colonizadores (colonisers)—who migrated to the area from the western altiplano in different waves since the 1970s.44

The MAS government maintains the position that the construction of the highway to run through TIPNIS was intended to benefit all inhabitants of the region, above and beyond any material interests specific to particular groups. “All sides in the dispute want greater development and improved access to basic services,” Fuentes writes, in an echo of the government’s line. “The issue at stake is how the second poorest country in the Americas, facing intense pressure from more powerful governments and corporate forces, can meet the needs of its people while protecting the environment”.45

A closer analysis, however, reveals the fact that certain groups would benefit from highway development at the expense of others. A zero-sum game developed, reflecting the usual growing class stratification within the peasantry under capitalist social relations, a process of differentiation mystified by pro-government, populist discourse that treats the peasantry as a homogeneous social class.

In particular, a significant and growing layer of the Aymara and Quechua peasants in the region can be classified as rich in the schema developed above—that is, they accrue profits as a direct result of surplus appropriation through the work of salaried labourers. As rich peasants they also have growing motivations for expanding accumulation through the expropriation of further land. Geographically, to one side, we find possibilities of expansion into the department of Santa Cruz. But this would imply incursions into the inhabited lands of other Aymara-Quechua migrant peasants, or the small, medium and large-scale capitalist agricultural and ranching expanses that make up the agro-industrial sector of that department. This is not something the MAS government has been willing to contemplate.

On the other side, that is, in TIPNIS to the north, we encounter the largely non-capitalist social relations of the Mojeños-Trinitarios, Chimanes and Yuracarés—that is, communities based on collective self-reproduction through small-scale agricultural activities, the extraction of forest resources, and artisanal production. Increasingly, layers of these indigenous communities are forced into semi-proletarian status through a process Marx called “primitive accumulation”,46 as they are compelled to sell their labour power for part of the year to ranchers, timber barons and the rich layer of the cocalero, or coca-growing, peasantry.47

As Guillermo Almeyra has perhaps understood better than anyone, the maintenance of an extractivist economy of natural resource extraction and capitalist agriculture geared towards export under the MAS government has necessarily meant repeated clashes with the hunger for land expressed by poor and landless peasants, as well as those indigenous communities rising up in defence of forests, natural resources, water and biodiversity.

Almeyra asks us to consider the legal and economic logic underpinning the current system that allows a few managers of a transnational mining or natural gas company operating in Bolivia today to gravely affect the environment of everyone without a care in the world, on the one hand, while 10,000 indigenous inhabitants of TIPNIS, with a non-capitalist mode of production, confront the full force of the law, and defamation by the government, when they seek to defend their values and ways of life against highway construction. This highway construction, far from being a neutral force for the “development” of all, would destroy the integrity of their territory, and would allow for the destruction of their norms and modes of living.48
Linking local class dynamics to Brazilian sub-imperialism

Such are the class dynamics at play on a local scale, but it would be a mistake to see this micro-rhythm as the only propeller behind the highway. The plan for road development is, in fact, one small part of a much more ambitious regional integration project driven by Brazilian capital and the Brazilian state, known as the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA). While opening up Bolivia’s northern savannah region to further capitalist expansion, the TIPNIS highway would also crucially provide an integral link in an international north east to south west trade corridor, allowing Brazilian commodities from the western expanses of that country to reach Pacific ports in northern Chile, via Bolivia.49

The details of the project were established on 4 August 2008, in an agreement signed by representatives of the Administradora Boliviana de Carreteras (Bolivian Administrator of Highways), the Brazilian construction company OAS, and the massive Brazilian development bank, the Banco Nacional de Desarrollo Económico y Social (BNDES). The price of construction was established at $415 million, 80 percent of which BNDES would provide to the Bolivian government as a loan, provided that a Brazilian company—ultimately OAS—be awarded the contract.50

Large swathes of Bolivian popular society have found more persuasive protesters’ accounts of the highway project, it seems, than the government’s crude equivocations concerning the “development” the highway would bring, as well as the by now all too familiar, and all too easy defamation of the marchers as manipulated tools, or useful idiots, of western NGOs, US imperialism and the domestic far-right.

More compelling to many have been the protesters’ understandings, rooted in a history of indigenous struggle for self-determination, as well as class analysis tied to the diametrically opposed interests of different social groups imbricated in the region’s dynamics. The interests of Brazilian sub-imperialism are almost self-evident. Domestically there are open alliances between government and agro-industrial soy producers in the eastern lowlands, particularly those in Santa Cruz, and financial capital, as expressed in the booming banking sector. These bourgeois groups have traditionally played an intermediary role in South American rhythms of capital accumulation, articulating with the wider interests of Brazilian sub-imperialism. Soy producers vehemently oppose authentic agrarian reform for obvious material reasons.

Meanwhile, as noted, within the increasingly class-stratified peasantry a rich layer of cocaleros, a central social component of the government’s rural base, has emerged with expansionary interests for coca production that could be satisfied in TIPNIS without encroaching on large landholdings through authentic agrarian reform elsewhere in the country. Poorer layers of the peasantry in TIPNIS, an amalgam of increasingly dispossessed indigenous communities, could serve as wage labour in coca production for richer peasants as they already have in larger numbers each year.

Moreover, the illegal activities of narco-trafficking and logging are not easily separable from the legal endeavours of finance, coca growing and agro-industry, not to mention construction and real estate, particularly in the cities of Cochabamba and Santa Cruz, where dirty money is made clean. The narcos and timber barons, with ties to the state through various channels of corruption, are also in line to benefit from easier access in and through TIPNIS.

Finally, directly from the mouth of the minister of hydrocarbons and energy for the government of Evo Morales, we learned of the possibility of expansive hydrocarbon reserves within the TIPNIS region. Exploration for, and confirmation of, such riches would be vastly simplified with highway development and dispossession of uppity, partially non-capitalist indigenous social formations still presiding in the area.51 Thus any comprehensive understanding has to link the issue of TIPNIS development with the interests of petroleum multinationals, and consider the ties between these multinationals and the Bolivian state.
Assessing the politics of the TIPNIS march

It was out of this dynamic that a march of 65 days duration emerged, backed by 12 lowland and highland indigenous organisations, the most important of which were the lowland Confederation of Indigenous Peoples of Bolivia and a highland organisation, CONAMAQ. This context helps to explain how the march was able to grow from 500 people at its outset to 2,500 people en route, with additional mass expressions of support in the form of thousands upon thousands taking to the streets in solidarity in the cities—including a general strike called for by the Bolivian Workers Central—in the wake of fierce repression of unarmed protesters on 25 September 2011.52 The campaign of defamation and violence orchestrated by the government ultimately proved unsuccessful. The popularity of the president plummeted. Ministers resigned. And the decision on the highway—ostensibly “non-negotiable” in August—was reversed by October.

It is true that there were opportunistic interventions by reactionary forces in the course of events, as is natural in any such scenario. We do not yet know the extent of US involvement or that of the far-right from the eastern lowlands. It is safe to assume, however, that they attempted infiltration. What is interesting, though, is that it appears from initial evidence that it was less the extreme right of the eastern lowlands that attempted to milk the conflict for all it was worth, than the centre-right, under the guise of the Movimiento Sin Miedo (Movement without Fear, MSM), erstwhile allies of the government. The MSM is the political vehicle of former La Paz mayor Juan del Granado. Granado is the first oppositional figure to emerge with even a remote hope of presenting a realistic electoral challenge to Morales.

It is also true that two of the 16 demands put forth by the TIPNIS march against the highway were deeply problematic in different ways—one endorsed the UN-Redd initiative (Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which would essentially place the preservation of forests in the hands of foreign capital, and the other called for the total closure of natural gas extraction from Aguaragüe, from which 90 percent of the gas currently sold and consumed in Bolivia is extracted. But these demands can be criticised without refuting the central problematic of the struggle, its essentially just nature, and its overwhelming character as an expression of the self-organisation and self-activity of an oppressed and exploited people defending their life values against the imposition of the exchange value of capital.

This is a revolt in the revolutionary, rather than conservative, tradition of anti-capitalist romanticism. Michael Löwy has explained:
[begin excerpt]
The central feature of industrial (bourgeois) civilisation that Romanticism criticises is the quantification of life, ie the total domination of (quantitative) exchange-value, of the cold calculation of price and profit, and the laws of the market, over the whole social fabric…the decline of all qualitative values—social, religious, ethical, cultural or aesthetic ones—the dissolution of all qualitative human bonds, the death of imagination and romance, the dull uniformisation of life, the purely “utilitarian”—ie quantitatively calculable—relation of human beings to one another, and to nature.53
[end excerpt]

For many of the TIPNIS marchers, their struggle for meaningful self-determination has been precisely one of defending their collective social, religious, ethical, cultural and aesthetic values against the dull advance of bourgeois industrialisation, taking the concrete form in this case of an expressway for Brazilian capital.

Leftists siding with the Bolivian state in this affair are comprehensible only insofar as they have embraced the linear developmentalist worldview of García Linera, captured most honestly in his 2006 theoretical formulation of “Andean-Amazonian Capitalism”. This text asserts the impossibility of establishing socialism in Bolivia for at least 50 to 100 years. Instead García Linera posits that Bolivia must first build an industrial capitalist base.

The capitalist model he envisions projects a greater role for state intervention in the market. The formula essentially means capitalist development with a stronger state to support a petty bourgeoisie which will eventually become a powerful national bourgeoisie to drive Bolivia into successful capitalist development. That national bourgeoisie will be indigenous, or “Andean-Amazonian”. Only after this long intermediary phase of industrial capitalism has matured will the fulfilment of socialism be materially plausible.54 Seen from the vantage point of Walter Benjamin in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, García Linera’s conceptualisation of history seems “fit to assign to the working class the role of redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength”. In so doing, it allows the working class to “forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren”. 55

As historian Brooke Larson writes, “Stories of [the Aymara indigenous hero] Tupac Katari’s six-month 1781 siege of La Paz still haunt the nightmares of its upper class inhabitants”.56 She might have added that, on the other side of the racialised class divide, these same stories have inspired contemporary indigenous radicals in their urban repertoires of insurrection and rural road blockading for much of the 21st century in Bolivia. Before Katari was drawn and quartered for his role in the 1781 revolt he warned the colonialists that he would “return as millions”, and the protagonists of recent rebellions see themselves as the embodiment of this return. They are, in a sense, more nourished by his image as enslaved ancestor than they are persuaded by a utopian industrial liberation, a century into the future.

As the Argentinian political economist Claudio Katz reminds us, “It is evident that the impediments to developing a competitive capitalist system in countries such as Bolivia are at least as great as the obstacles to initiating socialist transformations”.57 Fernando Molina, a neoliberal critic of the MAS, has correctly pointed out that in many respects Andean-Amazonian capitalism closely resembles the old line of the Stalinist Partido Comunista Boliviana (Bolivian Communist Party, PCB), which stressed the necessity of a “revolution by stages”: feudalism to capitalism (bourgeois), and eventually capitalism to communism (communist).58
Continuities in political economy

Recent scholarly literature has begun to demonstrate the very limited nature of the changes that have taken place under Morales. For example, Kenneth M Roberts and Steven Levitsky, two dominant figures in American political science, from Cornell and Harvard respectively, recently situated Bolivia’s economic policies, alongside those of Argentina and Ecuador, in a “heterodox” camp between the “orthodox” free market policies of Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Peru, and the “statist” policies of Venezuela.59

In the same edited volume Raúl Madrid points out that while the Bolivian government frequently engages in “radical, even incendiary, rhetoric” its “economic and social policies…have not represented a dramatic break with the past”.60 “Despite its period criticisms of capitalism,” Madrid argues, “the government has not sought to carry out a transition to socialism or change the existing pattern of development,” an argument substantiated by the fact that the economy remains “focused largely on the export of natural resources”, under the control of foreign capital, and that “the government has largely respected private property and has sought to encourage private investment”.61 The government has “eschewed radicalism in social policy as well, focusing instead on deepening or broadening policies that were enacted by previous governments”, while in the area of agrarian reform, the government’s “initiative, which it enacted in 2006 after protracted struggle in the Senate, is largely in keeping with the land reform principles laid down in the Sánchez de Lozada administration’s 1996 land reform measure”.62

Roberto Laserna, a prominent academic advocate of neoliberalism in Bolivia, poses a question: “What has changed in the last few years?” His answer: “A lot, if one observes the process in terms of its discourses and symbols and maintains a short-term perspective. But very little if one is attentive to structural conditions and observes the economic and social tendencies with a longer-term view”.63

“New economic policies have not signalled a dramatic shift towards a new economic model,” write Amy Kennemore and Gregory Weeks of Bolivia and Ecuador in recent years, “but rather a pragmatic way for centre-left governments to better capture capitalist surplus in the exploitation of natural resources”.64 “The Morales government has gone to enormous effort to demonstrate that it guarantees private property,” writes the critical Bolivian anthropologist Pablo Regalsky, “while at the same time seeking to maintain its social base”.65

Even in the domain of hydrocarbon (natural gas and oil) policy, where there is little dispute that the most far-reaching reforms have occurred under Morales, the early Marxist critiques of the “nationalisation” of 2006 have now been more widely acknowledged as essentially correct. For example, geographer Brent Z Kaup recently called it a “neoliberal nationalisation”. In a certain superficial sense “it technically returned physical control of Bolivia’s natural gas to the state”, but “the space opened up for private investment in the hydrocarbon sector in the 1980s and 1990s still exists. Transnational firms still extract the majority of Bolivia’s natural gas, and most of it is still sent to more profitable export markets”.66

It should not be surprising that the latest reports on Bolivia by the International Monetary Fund, released earlier this year, are full of praise for Bolivia’s “solid macroeconomic performance in recent years”, rooted in “prudent macroeconomic policies”, garnering “record-high net international reserves” for the Bolivian state.67 After IMF officials met with Bolivian state managers, the former group happily reported that the latter were “keen to keep macroeconomic equilibrium”.68

Another IMF report this year raises further doubt as regards Fuentes’s claims that economic policy has been “nationalised” under Morales. In 2009, the document notes, IMF authorities met with Bolivian managers and “praised the Bolivian authorities for their sound macroeconomic management”, but also advised the government to engage in the “gradual withdrawal of fuel subsidies”.69 The report goes on to explain that “the authorities attempted to eliminate fuel subsidies upfront [in December 2010], but this measure was reversed in the face of social unrest”.70 What the IMF is referring to here is the government’s attempt to eliminate fuel subsidies late last year in line with IMF requests, and the concomitant explosion of popular protest—the gasolinazo—that rippled through the major cities of the country, forcing the government ultimately to back down. The Morales administration remains to this day determined to reintroduce some version of the legislation that would abolish the subsidies.71

The World Bank also praises Bolivia’s macroeconomic management. Representatives of the bank have been meeting with state managers throughout 2011 in preparation for the drafting of a Country Partnership Strategy that will guide the bank’s activities in the country for the 2012-15 period. Thus far the bank has 13 active investment projects in Bolivia, totalling a commitment of just under $445 million.72
New currents of radical social theory

“In recent months”, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported in September of this year, “MAS supporters have become more aware of the breach between the revolutionary populist-socialist discourse of the president, Evo Morales, and his government’s more pragmatic policy course”.73

An important reflection of this appeared in the form of a Collective Manifesto released in June, which was signed by former MAS officials, leading social movement activists and radical intellectuals.74 “Today the large majority of our people basically find themselves in the same situation of poverty, precariousness and anguish in which they have always been”, the Manifesto reads. “It would seem that those who have improved are those that had always been well: the bankers, transnational oil and mining companies, the smugglers and the narco-traffickers”.75

“The continuity of political party clientelism and extractive, export-oriented development”, Forrest Hylton points out, “is the most remarkable feature of the new order—the liberal capitalist model, albeit one slightly modified in favour of national development, has survived. By Bolivian standards, it could even said to be thriving.” Indeed, for Hylton, “it is difficult to conceive of any government channelling revolutionary dynamism into reformist sclerosis more effectively than the Bolivian government’s enthusiasm for mining and resource extraction”.76

Likewise, for Mexican radical Raquel Gutiérrez—who lived in Bolivia between 1984 and 2001 and spent five of those years in jail as a political prisoner: “Evo has…led the reconstruction of the state along liberal-capitalist lines as dictated by the World Bank… It is increasingly difficult to distinguish between the policies imposed by this so-called progressive government and those followed by previous neoliberal governments; the rhetoric is different, but the results are largely the same. With resources extraction so central to the financial stability of the government, people and environments are simply expendable. Only disaster can emerge from this”.77
Conclusion

According to John Riddell, “Webber and others who agree with him are measuring the Bolivian government against an impossible standard, against the ideal programme of a hypothetical mass socialist movement”.78 However, Riddell, like Fuentes, can offer no reasonable response to the Morales regime’s ongoing commitment to fiscal austerity, low inflationary growth, central bank independence, labour market “flexibility”, inconsequential agrarian reform—even the expansion of capitalist social relations in the countryside, vast accumulation of international reserves, low social spending, alliances with transnational capital across all sectors of the economy—but particularly their dominance in natural resource extraction, export-oriented capitalism premised on low-wage flexible labour, documented increases in rates of exploitation of the working class, and state investment amounting to only 32 percent of total investment, with a maximum official goal of 36 percent.79 Riddell’s argument, although more sophisticated in a theoretical sense than that of Fuentes, ultimately ends up sounding dangerously close to a revised version of TINA: there is no alternative.

If one points to the real trends and contradictions in Bolivia’s political economy, even after explicitly calling for opposition to any and all imperialist intervention—direct or indirect, overt or covert—as I have repeatedly and at length in various writings, one is likely to receive a sharp reminder from the likes of Fuentes: “Our role is not to tell the Bolivian masses from afar that they are doing it all wrong or that their process is not revolutionary enough; our priority must be to defend the gains of the Bolivian process and help to create the necessary space for its continued advance”.80

The implied lesson here—it is not sufficient for activists and intellectuals in the Global North to condemn and fight the imperialism of our governments; we must also close our eyes to contradiction, shut our mouths, and play the role of Evo’s loyal soldiers abroad. International working class solidarity, on this view, means parroting the communiqués of the presidential palace in La Paz and aligning ourselves with Bolivian embassies in our countries. The palace and the embassy almost become the Bolivian masses. We must observe a stern silence as regards explosions of independent working class, peasant and indigenous resistance against the impositions of a reconstituted neoliberalism in Bolivia. Better still, when faced with a struggle like that in TIPNIS, we ought to tip our hats to their legitimate demands, while portraying the movement as largely a
 by-product of “green imperialism”. The endogenous linear developmentalism of García Linera’s Andean-Amazonian strategy—a veritable green light for the steamrolling of TIPNIS—is magically eclipsed in this view.

“Our consideration”, Benjamin suggests in a useful contradistinction to Fuentes, “proceeds from the insight that the politicians’ stubborn faith in progress, their confidence in their ‘mass basis’, and, finally, their servile integration in an uncontrollable apparatus have been three aspects of the same thing.” For Benjamin, our consideration, as historical materialists, “seeks to convey an idea of the high price our accustomed thinking will have to pay for a conception of history that avoids any complicity with the thinking to which these politicians continue to adhere”.81

The first priority of activists in the Global North, who are not persuaded in the least by the antiquated directives issued forth by the likes of Fuentes, should continue to be to oppose imperialist intervention of any sort in the determination of the Bolivian process. This means, concretely, opposition under any circumstances to imperialist-backed destabilisation campaigns against Morales. But the political situation is too complicated to end our discussion at that stage. Our first allegiance ought to be with the exploited and oppressed themselves, rather than any leaders or governments who purport to speak in their name in an uncomplicated way. This is as true of the TIPNIS struggle of 2011 as it was of the miners’ struggles of 2006 in Colquiri, the popular urban revolts against a right wing governor in Cochabamba in late 2006 and early 2007, the strikes of miners, teachers and healthcare workers in May 2010, the general strike in the department of Potosí in August 2010, the peasant, worker and community challenge to Japanese mining capital in 2010 at the San Cristóbal mine, and the popular rebellions against the elimination of fuel subsidies in December last year. The hope for Bolivia’s future remains with the overwhelmingly indigenous rural and urban popular classes, organising and struggling independently for themselves, against combined capitalist exploitation and racial oppression, with visions of simultaneous indigenous liberation and socialist emancipation, as we witnessed on a grand scale between 2000 and 2005.


Notes

1: Walter Benjamin, quoted in Löwy, 2006, pp66-67.

2: Thanks to Alex Callinicos and Sarah Hines for suggestions on an earlier draft of this article.

3: Página Siete, 3 November 2011.

4: Página Siete, 20 October 2011.

5: The Pact of Unity, established in 2004, pre-dated the formation of the MAS government.

6: Página Siete, 7 November 2011.

7: See García Linera, 2011.

8: Colectivo Manifiesto 22 de Junio, 2011, p286.

9: Webber, 2011a.

10: García Linera, 2006a, pp73-85.

11: Bensaïd, 2002.

12: Hylton, 2011, p245.

13: Economist, 10 December 2009.

14: See Stefanoni, 2010, pp4-17; Rossell, 2011, pp23-32.

15: Borón, 2009.

16: Rojas, 2009.

17: Stefanoni, 2010, pp4-5. For a discussion of the origins and trajectory of the eastern bourgeois bloc, see Webber, 2010.

18: Corte Nacional Electoral, 2010. For the April 2010 departmental elections, the position historically known as “prefect” was changed to “governor”.

19: Rathbone, 2010.

20: Fuentes, 2011a.

21: Fuentes, 2011b; Webber, 2011b.

22: Fuentes, 2011a.

23: In addition to the earlier translation and editing of seven volumes of documents of the Communist movement in the era of the Russian Revolution, Riddell has just completed the mammoth translation and editorial introduction of Toward the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922 (Brill, 2011). His writings on Bolivia, however, do not reveal a similar commitment to careful scholarship or precision, relying narrowly as they do on selective readings from the oeuvre of Federico Fuentes, Álvaro García Linera and the authorised biographer of Evo Morales, Martín Sivak. Riddell nonetheless also engages in a comradely and thoughtful critique of some of my recent articles and writings. My book From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia appears in the references, but the content of Riddell’s critique does not suggest a close reading of that text. See Riddell, 2011a.

24: Riddell, 2011a.

25: Riddell, 2011b.

26: Benjamin, 1999 [1940], p248.

27: These are roughly the unsubstantiated assertions made-with different emphases in different moments-by the Morales government and sympathetic journalists and analysts over the course of the conflict. In English, one example of this genre is Fuentes, 2011c. It is at least curious to note-given the government’s claims of an active conspiracy behind the march-that very shortly after the seeming resolution of the TIPNIS conflict, the Morales administration normalised relations with the US after three years of dispute. See Página Siete, 13 November 2011.

28: See Albó, 1996. Ironically, one of the best-sympathetic, even celebratory-accounts of the march can be found in a book co-authored by the vice-president. See García Linera, Chávez León and Costas Monje, 2006.

29: My discussion here draws upon Webber, 2011c, pp26-30.

30: Chávez and García Linera, 2005.

31: Enzinna, 2007, p 217.

32: Romero Bonifaz, 2005, p40.

33: Hylton and Thomson, 2007, p59.

34: Dunkerley, 1984, p67.

35: Ormachea Saavedra, 2007, pp29-32.

36: Ormachea Saavedra, 2007, p33.

37: Ormachea Saavedra, 2007, p34.

38: Pacheco Balanza and Ormachea Saavedra, 2000, p9.

39: Pacheco Balanza and Ormachea Saavedra, 2000, p19.

40: Pacheco Balanza and Ormachea Saavedra, 2000, pp31-32.

41: Ormachea Saavedra, 2007, pp27-28.

42: Ormachea Saavedra, 2007, p28.

43: Ormachea Saavedra, 2011a.

44: For the most lucid account of the region of which I am aware, see Orozco Ramírez, García Linera, and Stefanoni, 2006, pp29-117. Ironically, the title of the book translates as, “We are the playthings of nobody”, a notion that does not square well with García Linera’s position today, that they are indeed the playthings of imperialism, NGOs and the domestic right.

45: Fuentes, 2011c.

46: See part eight of Marx, 1977.

47: Ormachea Saavedra, 2011b.

48: Almeyra, 2011.

49: EIU, 2011, p 11.

50: Página Siete, 20 October 2011. For an interesting theorisation and empirical discussion of Brazilian sub-imperialism in South America, see Flynn, 2007, pp9-27.

51: For a brief sketch of some of these material interests in TIPNIS development, see Prada Alcoreza, 2011.

52: Página Siete, 20 October, 2011.

53: Löwy, 1987, p892.

54: García Linera, 2006b.

55: Benjamin, 1999 [1940], p252.

56: Larson 2004, p204.

57: Larson, 2004, p28.

58: Molina, 2006, p127.

59: Levitsky and Roberts, 2011.

60: Madrid, 2011, p240.

61: Madrid, 2011, p248.

62: Madrid, 2011, pp249-250.

63: Quoted in Robinson, 2011.

64: Kennemore and Weeks, 2011, p278.

65: Regalsky, 2010, p48.

66: Kaup, 2010, p135.

67: IMF, 2011a.

68: IMF, 2011a.

69: IMF, 2011b.

70: IMF, 2011b.

71: Página Siete, 12 November, 2011.

72: World Bank, 2011.

73: EIU, 2011, p10.

74: Colectivo Manifiesto 22 de Junio, 2011, pp285-293.

75: Colectivo Manifiesto 22 de Junio, 2011, p286.

76: Hylton, 2011, p244.

77: Gutiérrez, 2011, p277.

78: Riddell, 2011a.

79: See Webber, 2011c.

80: Fuentes, 2011b.

81: Benjamin, 1999 [1940], p250.


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Non-Human Nations: Whales, Dolphins

5th World nations are simply "the nations not on the map", and national identity is an extension of human psychology.

However, the proprietor of "5th World News" has decided that it is reasonable to include information about non-human nations. While many speculate about intelligent non-human life on other planets, we humans share this planet with intelligent non-humans whose psychology manifests in the identity of "tribes" each with their own language.

Threats to Whales, Dolphins:
* The morbillivirus (akin to human measles) [link]

Defenders of the Whales and Dolphins!
* "Champions for Cetaceans": A site where supporters of whales, dolphins, and porpoises can network, share information, and join forces to help save Cetaceans [championsforcetaceans.com]

2012-08-13 "Japanese Island of Toshima makes Dolphins official Citizens" [http://www.whitewolfpack.com/2012/08/japanese-island-of-toshima-makes.html]:
On a small island 100 miles from Tokyo islanders, mostly fishermen, have declared resident dolphins to be citizens, fully protected while in the island's waters
 On Sept. 1st of this year the annual dolphin slaughter will take place in Taiji Cove, Japan. Japan is a nation where up to 20,000 dolphins are killed yearly. So a new development recently in Japan is wonderful news in stark contrast as to what usually goes on in Japan. On a small island 100 miles from Tokyo islanders, mostly fishermen, have declared resident dolphins to be citizens, fully protected while in the island's waters.
 This tiny island is called Toshima Island. The fishermen there want to show the world how some Japanese revere and protect wild dolphins. A long time Japanese ally, Elsa Nature Conservancy, has pledged to help the Toshima Islanders educate Japan about the wonders of wild dolphins.
The Toshima Dolphin Project as it is known will expand knowledge of this unique island and the relationship between the people of the island and its 16 resident dolphins. The project will provide a vision that will inspire their fellow countrymen and bring to them an understanding of the importance of allowing dolphins to remain free and safe from hunters' blades.
 This is a description of the Toshima Dolphin Project written by Sakae Hemmi of Elsa Nature Conservancy. "In 1995 a dolphin came to Toshima waters and remained. In 1998 the dolphin, named Koko, gave birth. The baby was called Piko. The mother and baby were so revered that they were registered as citizens of the island. Around 2010 several dolphins from Mikura island moved to Toshima and several have given birth. As of February 2012, a pod of 16 dolphins swims in the waters of Toshima."
 The Dolphin Project was originally spearheaded by a Mr.Moriyama. Unfortunately the Mr. Moriyama, died in February of this year. But others have picked up the cause because they feel so strongly that this message must get out. Currently funds are urgently needed to finish the project website, send a video team to the island to film the dolphins and fishermen and to make a DVD for release in Japan. They also plan to hold a symposium in Tokyo on dolphins in Japanese waters.
 But the main message that The Toshima Dolphin Project wants to portray was expressed by Sakae Hemmi as: "I think it important to have many people learn and experience that wild dolphins are animals that we can make friends with and live together. Toshima is a very important place to raise the Japanese people's consciousness to protect wild dolphins."
 Hopefully with the efforts of these wonderful fishermen from Toshima Island there may soon come a day when all dolphins can live off the Japanese coast without threat of dying in such a cruel manner as currently takes place in Taiji Cove.

2013-07-18 "Dolphin buddies remember each other after 20 years apart"
[fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2013/08/2013-07-18-dolphin-buddies-remember.html]

2013-01-23 "Dolphins Crying for Help: What Marine Parks Don’t Want You To Know" [fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2013/01/2013-01-23-dolphins-crying-for-help.html]

2012-05-19 "Japanese Ships to Kill 260 Whales in Name of “Science” by Kristina Chew
[fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2012/05/dai-nippons-genocide-of-whales.html]

2012-05-18 "Talking To Dolphins Could Be Possible With New Device" by Beth Buczynski
[fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2012/05/2012-05-18-talking-to-dolphins-could-be.html]

2012-05-18 "Endangered Beluga Whales At Risk From Destructive Oil and Gas Drilling" by Alex Ralston from "Center for Biological Diversity" [fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2012/05/2012-05-18-endangered-beluga-whales-at.html]

2012-05-17 "WTO Rules US Dolphin Safe Tuna Label ‘Unfair’ to Mexico; Decision a Big Blow to Dolphin Protection, Say Environmentalists" by Maureen Nandini Mitra, Managing Editor for "Earth Island Journal" [fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2012/05/2012-05-17-wto-rules-us-dolphin-safe.html]

2012-05-13"Captain Paul Watson Arrested In Frankfurt, Germany on Warrant Issued by Costa Rica" [fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2012/05/sea-shepards-protectors-of-whales.html]

2012-04-06 "Thousands of dolphins may have died in Peru's massive die-off; cause could remain mystery" by Barbara Fraser [fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2012/04/dolphins_06.html]

2012-04-03 "What’s Killing Thousands of Dolphins in the Gulf?" by Kristina Chew [fifthworldnews.blogspot.com/2012/04/dolphins.html]
"Save an acre of the Whale Nursery for Earth Day"
[https://www.nrdcgreengifts.org/earth-day?s_src=care2]
Help protect gray whales and their last undisturbed nursery on the planet in honor of someone special.
Every year, gray whales migrate thousands of miles to this pristine sanctuary: Laguna San Ignacio on Mexico’s Baja Peninsula. But new threats are emerging that could despoil it forever.
NRDC is working to permanently protect the whale sanctuary by putting 500,000 acres around the lagoon off-limits to industrial development — and your gift will protect one of those acres in the name of a loved one! $20.00


2013-01-07 "Sea Shepherd Australia To Lead Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign; Founder and President Captain Paul Watson Steps Down From Sea Shepherd U.S. and Australia"
[http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/2013/01/07/sea-shepherd-australia-to-lead-antarctic-whale-defense-campaign-1477]:
At a press conference alongside the SSS Sam Simon at 10:00 am AEDT today in Hobart, the Australian Chapter of the global marine conservation non-profit, Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, announced it will direct the organization’s ninth Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign, Operation Zero Tolerance. Sea Shepherd founder and President, Captain Paul Watson, has stepped down from Sea Shepherd U.S. and Sea Shepherd Australia. The SSS Steve Irwin, typically captained by Captain Watson, will be manned by Captain Siddharth Chakravarty for the extent of the campaign. Captain Watson will remain aboard to document the campaign. Long-time colleague and advisor of Captain Watson, current board member Marnie Gaede will assume the role of President of Sea Shepherd U.S. while former Greens Party leader and former Australian Senator Bob Brown has joined the Board of Directors of Sea Shepherd Australia and will direct Operation Zero Tolerance along with Director of Sea Shepherd Australia, Jeff Hansen. These changes are being adopted in order for Sea Shepherd to continue its vital mission of defending at-risk whales in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary.
"I am honored to serve the great whales of the Southern Ocean and Sea Shepherd in this way,” said former Greens Party leader and former Senator Brown. My admiration for Paul Watson is inversely proportional to the Japanese government’s anger at Sea Shepherd's success at preventing the slaughter of almost 4,000 whales in recent years,” he added. “I ask Australians to support generously so that this great mission can continue.”
Over the past eight seasons, Sea Shepherd’s work defending whales has been endorsed by the majority of Australian citizens, hence Sea Shepherd is doing the job that most Australians want to see done to protect whales. Much like this past summer’s Operation Kimberley Miinimbi, Sea Shepherd’s Southern Ocean campaign is ultimately a project based in Australia and relates to whale protection in the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. Sea Shepherd Australia has always been heavily involved in the planning and fundraising for the Southern Ocean campaign. Sea Shepherd Australia’s directorship of the Antarctic Whale Defense Campaign is a natural evolution of Sea Shepherd’s growth around the world and in regions such as Australia.
“This is one of Sea Shepherd’s most widely followed campaigns, endorsed by hundreds of thousands of citizens around the world, but the fact remains the whales of the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary reside in Australia’s backyard,” Hansen said. “In fact, the whales at risk in the Southern Ocean are some of the very same whales who migrate there from the waters off the coast of Western Australia. It makes sense that Australians should take up the gauntlet and defend them,” he added.
Sea Shepherd has been engaging in interventions on the high seas in defense of marine wildlife for 35 years and for eight seasons against Japan’s Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) — a front for illegal, government-subsidized whaling — all within the confines of the law and without causing serious injury. Each December, Sea Shepherd journeys to Antarctica to defend the whales inside a marine sanctuary from being killed by the ICR. Over the last eight campaigns in the Southern Ocean, Sea Shepherd has saved the lives of nearly 4,000 whales and exposed illegal Japanese whaling activities to the world.
In February of last year, the ICR lost a preliminary injunction they brought against Sea Shepherd U.S. to try and prevent the organization from protecting whales during this year’s Antarctic whale defense campaign, Operation Zero Tolerance. That decision was overturned last month and an injunction was issued by The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Washington State in favor of the ICR. The whaling fleet has claimed injuries to their crew, although they have not been able to produce a shred of medical evidence confirming their claims. Meanwhile, Sea Shepherd has videotaped evidence of ICR ships ramming and damaging Sea Shepherd ships, in one case completely destroying a $1.5 million dollar vessel, injuring a cameraman and nearly drowning six crewmembers, but the ICR has not so much as even been questioned. Furthermore, in January 2008, the Federal Court in Australia ruled the ICR’s whaling to be illegal and issued an injunction against the whalers, but the whalers continue killing in violation of that court order. They are also hunting in the Australian Exclusive Economic Zone and are carrying loaded rifles on board their ships in a demilitarized zone, a violation of the Antarctic Treaty.
In addition to Hansen and Brown, former Federal Environment Minister of Australia Ian Campbell spoke at the press conference and had this to say about the campaign: “Sea Shepherd Australia has one mission this summer and that is 'Zero Tolerance' of blood in the Southern Ocean. The Japanese have armed their vessels with harpoons that maim and kill whales, and guns that can maim and kill humans,” he said. “Sea Shepherd Australia is there to protect whales and if its vessels have to get within 450 meters of a killer ship to save a whale, then that is what will be done. If the Japanese say they won't go within 450 meters of a whale, Sea Shepherd Australia will do the same,” he added.
Encouraged by the worldwide support being expressed for this campaign, Captain Paul Watson said: “Sea Shepherd Australia is in a very good position to lead this campaign in the Southern Ocean. We have every faith they will ensure Operation Zero Tolerance is a complete success.”
Background:
Australia instituted proceedings against Japan in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on May 31, 2010 and was joined by New Zealand on November 21, 2012 with respect to a dispute concerning Japan’s JARPA II program on “scientific whaling.”
The December 17th decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in Washington State overturns a previous ruling in Sea Shepherd’s favor. It mandates that Sea Shepherd U.S. must not physically confront any vessel or any person on any vessel engaged by plaintiffs, the ICR, in the Southern Ocean, and must not navigate in a manner that is likely to endanger the safe operation of any such vessel. It also states that defendants shall not approach plaintiffs any closer than 500 yards when defendants are navigating on the open sea. The injunction is to remain in place until the court issues an opinion on the merits of the appeal filed by the ICR.
The ICR lawsuit is funded by a Japanese government subsidy of some $30 million USD in Tsunami Relief Funds donated to aid the victims of the tsunami, earthquake and nuclear crisis, not to hunt whales. It is part of a larger strategy by Japan’s ICR to curtail Sea Shepherd’s interventions to defend at-risk whales in the established Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary. As a result of this plan, Sea Shepherd founder Captain Paul Watson is the target of two ‘red notices’ issued by Interpol put forth at the request of Costa Rica and Japan, which seek to extradite him to those nations for trial on trumped up, politically motivated charges related to defending marine wildlife from poachers.
Hansen and Brown collaborated this past summer to defend the largest humpback whale nursery in the world from development of the largest gas factory in the world at James Price Point during Sea Shepherd Australia’s highly successful campaign, Operation Kimberley Miinimbi.
Read Captain Paul Watson's statement [http://www.seashepherd.org/news-and-media/editorial-130107-1.html]

Moskitia

"History of Mosquitia"
from "World HIstory at KMLA" [http://www.zum.de/whkmla/region/centramerica/xmosquitia.html]:
The Atlantic coast of what is today Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica is of low altitude, largely covered by tropical rainforest. Spanish settlement in the 16th and 17th century concentrated on the highland Cordillera region further to the west. The Atlantic coastal region of what then was the Audiencia of Guatemala was an area largely neglected by the Spanish authorities, thinly populated, in the region of present-day Atlantic Nicaragua and adjacent strips of modern Honduras and Costa Rica, by the Miskito Indians.
 From the early 17th century onward, Englsh privateers frequented the Atlantic coastal regions. As both the English and the native Miskito regarded the Spanish their enemies, they developed friendly relations, and the English settled on several locations along the coast. In 1655 England acquired Jamaica from Spain. While England fortified Jamaica, the Atlantic coast region of mainland Central America was treated as a sphere of influence, but no effort was undertaken to establish fortifications, and little effort was undertaken to delineate the borders of the area; the relation with Spain was that of war, and English supremacy on the sea secured the status quo.
 In the late 17th century European politics changed the situation : Louis XIV.'s threat to establish French hegemony on the European continent caused England (since 1707 the United Kingdom) to enter into an alliance with Spain. While Spain for the late 17th and much of the 18th century accepted the status quo - as long as Spain and Britain were at peace - it never formally recognized the legitimacy of the political entities under British protection on the Atlantic coast.
 From 1780 to 1783 Spain and Britain were at war; Spanish forces took control of most of the coast of present-day Honduras. Following a rebellion of the Black Caribs (Garifuna speakers) on the island of Saint Vincent, in 1796 the British resettled the Black Caribs on Roatan Island and the Atlantic coast of present-day Honduras.
 The early 19th century saw the independence of Mexico and the United Provinces of Central America. The latter went through a turbulent period (1821-1839) which ended in disintegration, Guatemala, El Salvador, Hondurs, Nicaragua and Costa Rica gaining independence. Now the Mosquito Coast and British Honduras (= Belize) were established as British protectorates.
Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica did not recognize British control of the Mosquito Coast. The British attitude toward their Mosquito Coast protectorate can be described as benevolent toward the indigenous population and reluctant to commit to investing in the development of the area. In 1860 Britain handed over the administration of the region to Nicaragua (border treaties with Honduras and Costa Rica resulted in fractions of the area coming under the sovereignty of these countries).
 At the time of the handover, the Mosquito Coast, while thinly populated and with a poorly developed infrastructure, was more affluent than core Nicaragua - a fact expressed by the Mosquito Coast using a silver currency, while core Nicaragua used coinage the denomination of which did not correspond the value of its metal. The usage of tax revenue collected in the Mosquito Coast region for investment in core Nicaragua was the cause for political discontent and occasional unrest in the later part of the 19th century.





Communitarian Nation of Moskitia



A Moskito Family in Nicaragua (photo: Barry Tessman)


"Miskito Nation blames gov't, ALBA"
2012-02-25 by Tim Rogers from "Nicaragua Dispatch" [http://www.nicaraguadispatch.com/news/2012/02/miskito-nation-blames-gov’t-alba/2389/2389]:
Backing Lapan: The Council of Elders for the Communitarian Nation of the Moskitia is calling for resistance (photo/ Tim Rogers)

The Mosquito Coast’s ancestral Council of Elders is calling on indigenous communities to “organize against the aggression and neutralize the actions of invasion, occupation, destruction of forests, land sales and illegal concession that the State of Nicaragua is promoting as a new form of neo-colonialization.”
In response to the recent indigenous uprising in the community of Lapan, which has taken 12 outsiders prisoner in a tense standoff between indigenous and non-indigenous residents on the Caribbean coast, the Council of Elders today released a five-point declaration blaming the situation on Sandinistas’ political and economic interests in the region.
The elder council’s declaration denounces the “powerful business interests of the Venezuelan ALBA (group) of Hugo Chávez that is claiming ownership of our natural resources,” and calls for solidarity “with the just cause of the community of Lapan for defending themselves against this aggression.”
The indigenous council, which represents the Communitarian Nation of the Moskitia, says it also refuses to recognize “any title, transaction, or illegal payment for indigenous lands.”
“The international treaties of the Moskitia and the Sacred Writings recognize that each national or people has the right to defend its territories,” the declaration reads. “The Sumos Mayangnas, Ramas and Miskitus are the Original Nations with historic rights to the Moskitia.”
The declaration is signed by Otis Lam Hoppington, the eldest living member of the Council of Elders, as well as council directors Alejandro Barquero and Roberto Thomas.
The declaration comes one day after the separatists political leader, the Wihta Tara—or great judge—told The Nicaragua Dispatch that the Communitarian Nation of the Moskitia is not behind the recent uprising in Lapan.
The Council of Elders announced its support for the rebirth of the Communitarian Nation of the Moskitia in 2006, but has been relatively quiet for several years. The government of Nicaragua does not recognize the group’s claim to independence.


"Land conflicts lead to racial tensions on Caribbean coast: Part I in a two-part series on land conflicts in Nicaragua"
2012-02-24 by Tim Rogers from "Nicaragua Dispatch" [http://www.nicaraguadispatch.com/news/2012/02/land-conflicts-lead-to-racial-tensions-on-caribbean-coast/2379/2379]:
The agricultural frontier continues to advance into Bosawas (photo/ Tim Rogers)

Miskito separatists pose with homemade weapons in 2011 in response to a wave of land invasions around Bilwi. The conflict over indigenous lands has since gotten even more heated, as another Miskito community rises up against land invasions by west coast “colonists” (photo/ Tim Rogers)

The continuous wave of land invasions and outside encroachment into indigenous communal lands by non-indigenous Nicaraguans has sparked a Miskito uprising in one rural community and wider fears of growing racial tensions in the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN).
“This is a time bomb,” Miskito leader Reynaldo Francis, the regional leader of the Yatama indigenous group, told The Nicaragua Dispatch Friday afternoon in a phone conversation from Bilwi, the regional capital of the RAAN.
“This is a very dangerous situation. We’ve never had a conflict like this before between the colonists and the indigenous. The Nicaraguan government has to respond quickly to this situation because it could get out of hand fast,” Francis stressed.
By “colonists” Francis is referring to non-indigenous Nicaraguans who, since the 1990s, have been encroaching on the lush indigenous land to raise cattle, grow crops or extract precious hardwoods.
The indigenous leader says several Miskito communities and Yatama ex-combatants are organizing to defend themselves in the northern communities of Waspam and Río Coco. If the situation is not dialed back quickly, it could become very dangerous, he warns.
“People are running out of patience,” Francis said. “Right now any crazy person could do something to provoke the other side.”
The crisis started Feb. 9, when six non-indigenous “volunteer policemen” wearing uniforms and armed with guns tried to arrest two indigenous community leaders in the rural Miskito village of Lapan, some 80 kilometers southwest of Bilwi.
The Miskito community, which was already suspicious of outsiders invading their lands, captured the six policemen and locked them up. A few days later, the community took six more prisoners, bringing the number of detained “colonists” to 12.
Lapan has since closed off its community to all outsiders, and insists it won’t release its prisoners until all the colonists leave their land.
The mestizo (Nicaraguan non-indigenous) population on the Caribbean coast quickly organized to defend their own. The mestizos, many of whom are affiliated with either the Sandinista Front or the Liberal Constitutional Party (PLC), used trucks and busses to block the main roads in and out of Bilwi, cutting off commerce and public transportation. The mestizo protesters say the roadblocks will continue until all the prisoners are released by their indigenous captures.
The roadblock, now in its second week, has reportedly led to the beginning of food shortages in the Bilwi market. It has also prevented people in the RAAN from traveling over land to Managua for medical attention or other business.
Francis warns that if the situation is not resolved quickly, the Miskito population in Bilwi could rise up against the mestizos, triggering an ugly racial conflict that will be hard to control once it starts.
“The Caribbean coast has become contaminated with mestizos,” Francis says. “They keep advancing on our lands and cutting our trees. They already have us pushed up against the ocean, and now they want to put us in the ocean. But we are not fish to live in the ocean.”
Though Francis’ Yatama—an indigenous movement that rose up in arms against the first Sandinista government in the 1980s—is now allied with the Sandinistas on certain national political issues, he says the indigenous land issue is one that trumps their political alliance and unifies all Miskito people.
“This is our ancestral struggle,” Francis said. “Many young Miskito men fought and sacrificed their lives for this land.”

Titling indigenous land -
Land conflicts are not new on the Caribbean coast, but they have flared again in recent years.
In 2003, the government of President Enrique Bolaños passed Law 445, legislation to demarcate indigenous land and give structure to Nicaragua’s 1987 Autonomy Law. The formalization of property titles and limitations has reinvigorated some older conflicts over land ownership and management.
Indigenous populations claim the mestizos’ continued deforestation of their ancestral lands has reached a critical point. Even the Nicaraguan Army recently admitted that land invasions and deforestation has reached the very heart of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, considered the “lungs of Central America.”
“The mestizos are invading and destroying our land; they want to turn it into a desert like they’ve done on the Pacific coast,” says Rev. Hector Willams, the Wihta Tara—or “great judge” of the ancestral Communitarian Nation of the Mosquita.
“This is causing the people to rise up,” the Wihta Tara told The Nicaragua Dispatch today in a phone interview from Bilwi. “The problem is big and it is serious.”
Wihta Tara says the current uprising in Lapan is a grassroots movement to defend the land. He insists he is not behind Lapan’s rebellion, though the cause of the community’s pushback is very similar to that of the separatists.
“Wihta Tara is not behind this,” he said. “They are defending their own land, because in the end, each community has to defend itself.”
Yatama’s Francis, meanwhile, thinks the central government is making a mistake by continuing to ignore the problem. He says the central government is so vertically structured that state authorities RAAN stand around with their arms folded until they receive orders from President Daniel Ortega, who has not commented on the situation after two weeks.
“Apparently they are more interested in the EU report about election fraud. But we are not interested in that,” Francis said.
The indigenous leader also questions why the state doesn’t give the same attention to indigenous’ land claims as they do to wealthy investors on the Pacific coast.
Francis says he finds it interesting that the Prosecutors’ Office has started talks with Punta Teonoste over the disputed territory claimed by the luxury eco-hotel, but has not given the indigenous people the same treatment when it comes to their claims about communal land.
“There they are negotiating over 20 manzanas of land that the state wants to give to Edén Pastora, but here they won’t listen to us and we’re talking about thousands and thousands of manzanas of land,” Francis said. “The state needs to pay attention to this situation.”
(Next week: part II: Pacific coast problems)


"Honduras: Honduran Moskitia Peoples To Defend Their Territory"
from "Honduran Black Fraternal Organization (OFRANEH)", translated from Spanish 2011-04-02 posted to [http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=9676:honduras-honduran-moskitia-peoples-to-defend-their-territory&catid=30&Itemid=63]:
On Monday 28 March, over one thousand indigenous Miskito, Tawahka, Pech and Garifuna moved to Puerto Lempira for the purpose of claiming Moskitia autonomy, the right to free, prior and informed , the immediate cessation of the construction of hydroelectric dams in the river Patuca, in addition to the eviction of the U.S. base in the Laguna de Karataska.
Moskitia became a party in the year 1861 the territory of the Republic of Honduras, through the treaty between Great Britain and Honduras called Wyke-Cruz, the content that clarified the rights of the Miskito people on the ancestral territory, without that the various Republican administrations throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, had taken account of that treaty.
The systematic looting of the Moskita is a sign of internal colonialism that we have been subjected indigenous and black peoples in Honduras: From the forest resources and coastal and marine, from the abuse committed by the manipulated agricultural colonization fronts, ethnocide made with the divers by the industrial fishing fleet based in the Bay Islands.
They are part of the mechanisms of subjugation that have been used to destroy a very important area of the planet. In recent years, production of protected areas by international financial organizations, has become another form of dispossession.
The territory of the Moskitia lacks legal recognition, a situation that is exploited by the ruling elite in Honduras to continue with the expropriation of territories considered key for their extraction and biofuel projects.
A major concern felt by the peoples of the Moskitia, is the construction of dams on the river Patuca, which destroyed the coastal water system in addition to condemning the people Tawahka disappearance.
Although Honduras has ratified the ILO Convention 169, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and the Convention on Biological Diversity: does not respect the right to free, prior and informed consultation, we have the indigenous peoples, this being a violation of the Vienna Convention (1969), in ignoring the pacta servanda Sunt (the agreement required), one of the pillars of international law.
The coup of 2009, destroyed the nascent rule of law, accelerating the destruction of the Rio Platano Biosphere, and intensifying the presence of foreign groups that are deforested at a rapid pace the biosphere, both for livestock, and for planting in the near future oil palm and sugar cane for the voracious international market for biofuels,
The claims of the peoples of the Moskitia that have been going on for decades have been buried by World Bank projects, World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, who through Our Roots Program and DIPA, attempted to neutralize crumbs historical claims that have been taking place.
The peoples of the Moskitia are initiating a process of self-demarcation, to solve the inertia of the state, and the failure of numerous agreements. The process of deterritorialization has been protected by the absence of a Community in favor of Moskitia.
The installation of a U.S. military base in the Laguna de Karataska, after the coup, with the supposed guise of stopping drug trafficking, is part of the military occupation that suffers from Central America under the Merida Initiative, the peoples of the Moskitia were never consulted.
We understand the problems of social tissue destruction caused by the scourge of drugs, but at the same time, after more than three decades of futile war against drugs and the few results that emerged from Plan Colombia, the Merida Initiative is not that a strategy of domination.
In the last Assembly of the peoples of the Earth and Sea, held in the Garifuna community of San Juan Tela in February of this year, indigenous peoples and blacks in the country, together we decided to unconditionally the struggle waged by the brothers of the Moskitia in relation to the autonomy of their territory and the immediate suspension of the river hydroelectric Patuca and Sico.
We hope that the nation-state autonomy understand this as a call to respect the territorial and the right to consultation, and not as a balkanization of Honduras in a disjointed and Central America.
Indigenous peoples and blacks, we are preparing to mobilize to the Moskitia in the coming months, to carry out a day of solidarity and demand the cancellation of the construction of mega dams that affect the Patuca and coastal water system, generating unimaginable consequences for the peoples Tawahkas, Miskito, Pech and Garifuna.


"The Communitarian Nation of Moskitia?"  
2010-10-18 by Martin W. Lewis [http://www.geocurrents.info/place/latin-america/the-communitarian-nation-of-moskitia]: On February 17, 2010, Nicaragua’s La Prensa reported that a local council of elders had asked the people of Nicaragua’s coastal region not to participate in upcoming regional elections. The elders, representing the Miskito Indians, urged noncompliance for a simple reason: they no longer recognize the authority of the government of Nicaragua. In August 2009, community leaders announced the independence of the “Communitarian Nation of Moskitia,” declaring that henceforth they themselves formed “el único Gobierno que debe ser reconocido” (“the only government that should be recognized”). Loose plans for secession had been in place since 2001, when 280 indigenous communities pledged solidarity in seeking peaceful separation from Nicaragua. In 2008 and 2009, disputes with the government, especially over the spiny lobster fishery, intensified, leading to the declaration of independence. Nicaragua has not formally responded – nor has any other country, to my knowledge. The actual “independence” of the region remains largely imaginary.
The word “Miskito” has nothing to do with biting flies, but that hasn’t stopped eastern Nicaragua from being called the Mosquito Coast. The Miskitos, some 150,000 to 200,000 strong, share the region with several other indigenous groups, as well as English-speaking Afro-Nicaraguans and some Spanish-speaking mestizos. In general, the east is culturally opposed to the rest of the country: Creole English and indigenous languages are more widely spoken than Spanish, and Protestantism (with strong indigenous and African elements) is more widespread than Catholicism. Moskitia’s would-be leaders claim that their new country will be ethnically inclusive, but its political structures are to be based on Misktito traditions. Hector Williams, head of the movement, goes by the indigenous title of Wihta Tara, or Great Judge.
The Miskitos formed a kind of state as far back as the 1700s, reportedly ruled by a king in consultation with governors, commanding a well-organized military force. Allied with the British in the Caribbean, they fought the Spanish colonial realm, retaining the autonomy of their homeland. After the independence of the Spanish colonies in the early 1800s, Britain maintained a loose and unofficial protectorate over the region. As shown in the above 1842 map (published by Chapman and Hall, from the David Rumsey collection), the area was often mapped as an independent Indian realm, an unusual cartographic category at that time. The British withdrew in the late 1800s, and in 1894 the so-called Mosquito Coast was annexed by Nicaragua. A remote region, it remained largely left to itself until the late mid-1900s.
The position of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coastal region changed dramatically in 1979, when the country’s new Marxist Sandinista government sought to tap its resources and integrate it with the rest of the country. Sandinista leaders also objected to the use of English along the Mosquito Coast, which they viewed as a legacy of British imperialism. Miskito leaders refused to comply with their demands. They quickly formed militias, which joined forces with the so-called contras (“counter-revolutionaries) struggling against the government.
Stability returned to the Caribbean coast in 1990 when Sandinista leader Daniel Ortega was democratically replaced by his former ally, Violeta Chamorra. In 2007, a reformed Daniel Ortega returned to power through the ballot box. Ortega may now be a culturally conservative Catholic, but economically and geopolitically he remains a leftist, and he has joined Hugo Chavez’s “Bolivarian Alternative of the Americas.” Ortega’s return to power was one of the main reasons Miskito elders declared independence.


"Nicaragua's Miskitos seek independence"
2009-08-03 by Stephen Gibbs from "BBC News" [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8181209.stm]:
Lawyer Oscar Hodgson says the Miskitos should be independent

It takes an hour and a half in a light aircraft to reach the Mosquito Coast from the Nicaraguan capital, Managua.
By road it is a journey of almost 20 hours.
You cross 450km (280 miles) of remote terrain; forested mountains and then deserted swampland.
It feels like travelling to another country.
And that is precisely what many of the people who live here say it should be.
For centuries, the Miskito people have made up the majority indigenous population on this bleak, flat coastline. Last April, a group of their elders formally declared independence.
No more, they said, would they pay any heed to the government in Managua. No longer would they pay taxes. Instead their loyalty would be to the "Community Nation of Moskitia".
A flag was designed, and a national anthem composed.
"Every nation has the right to independence," says Oscar Hodgson, a lawyer for the independence movement. "And we are a nation."
His surname, like many in the Miskito community, reveals something of the history of this isolated outpost.

British protectorate -
Throughout most of the 18th and 19th Centuries, the Miskitos were allied to the British, whose navy provided them with weapons, and encouraged them to launch raids on neighbouring Spanish bases.
Their land, which stretched from what is now Honduras in the north, almost to Costa Rica in the south, became an informal British protectorate.
But in 1894, by which time the protectors had other priorities, the territory was annexed by Nicaragua.
The current leader of the Miskitos is an affable, avuncular man called Hector Williams. His Miskito title is Wihta Tara, or Great Judge.
"The people asked me to lead them, and that is what I shall do," he says, as he stands in the warm evening sun overlooking the Caribbean sea.
The relationship between the Miskito people and the government in Managua has never been easy.
After the Sandinista revolution led by Daniel Ortega succeeded in 1979, many Miskitos were quick to join the US-backed counter-revolutionaries or "contras".
Some found the Marxist route they saw President Ortega following as offensive to their religion and their culture.

Lobsters -
But the latest catalyst for conflict is not primarily ideological, but economic.
Specifically, it is the price of lobster.
Miskitos have traditionally been employed as hired hands on government-licensed lobster fishing vessels along this coast.
In the last few months, their wages have been cut. The foreign owners of the boats say that they are reacting to the fall in global markets. The Miskitos suspect a rip-off.
"They pay us less and take a bigger cut," says Mario, a lobster diver. He is standing on the scrubbed wooden deck of the Puerto Cabezas port. Behind him are dozens of boats, all in harbour because business is so bad.
"The lobsters should be ours anyway," he adds.
His discontent, and that of hundreds of divers like him, has been seized upon by the Miskito leadership in their latest bid for independence.

Unemployment -
The movement appears to have been given a sense of urgency by the fact that two oil drilling concessions have recently been granted off the coastline.
"They take everything from us, and give nothing back," says Oscar Hodgson.
But the mayor of Puerto Cabezas, Guillermo Espinozo, doubts that the independence movement is as popular as it claims.
"It's all connected with the lack of employment," he says. "If I called these people...and offered them jobs, they would come here and work. They would soon stop talking about independence."
Puerto Cabezas is the poorest corner of Nicaragua. Unemployment stands at around 80%.
In its municipal square, grown men sit aimlessly on the children's swings. On a concrete block across the road there is a fading poster calling for Daniel Ortega's election in 2006. It is covered with insulting graffiti.
A few blocks away hundreds of Miskitos gather at the indigenous people's community centre.
"Long live independence," they chant. And they sing their national anthem.


"Independence for Moskitia?"
2009-08-04 [http://www.nicaliving.com/node/15441]:
The BBC has an article titled Nicaragua's Miskitos seek independence which, while pretty basic, can give you an idea of the issues and what the "Spanish surname" folks think.
I do have one nit with the history section of the article. The recent part says:
[begin excerpt] The relationship between the Miskito people and the government in Managua has never been easy. After the Sandinista revolution led by Daniel Ortega succeeded in 1979, many Miskitos were quick to join the US-backed counter-revolutionaries or "contras". Some found the Marxist route they saw President Ortega following as offensive to their religion and their culture. [end excerpt]
Historically, this region was ignored by the Nicaraguan government and, for most people in the region, that was just fine. That is, they were de facto self-governing first because the British pretty much ignored them and then, when annexed by Nicaragua, they continued to be ignored. The language difference and lack of transportation routes supported this isolation.
After Somoza was run out of Nicaragua, the Sandinistas wanted to "solve" this neglect problem and went to the region to tell the people that there was a new government of good guys and they wanted to help.
The article blames "the Marxist route" as the issue. (I will give the author credit for saying "some".) The reality is that you have a people that have been living just fine without anyone "helping" and then a new group of people come in, say "were the new boss and we want to help you" and what will be your reaction? Most likely, "we're fine, go away".
This "trying to be the new boss" approach lead to some Sandinista errors (which they readily admit to). To the new government's credit, they eventually did "get it". The draft constitution was published in Spanish, English and Miskito and it granted autonomy to the region.
Now, after the article as an intro, it would be nice to see why their Autonomy is not enough.


"Miskitos Declare Independent Nation of Moskitia in Nicaragua"
2009-06-10 [http://indigenouspeoplesissues.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=827:miskitos-declare-independent-nation-of-moskitia-in-nicaragua&catid=30&Itemid=63]:
On April 19th, representatives from 360 Mískito communities declared the secession of the entire Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, also known as the Mosquito Coast. They announced that the area, which accounts for 46% of Nicaragua’s territory and an estimated 11% of the population, would form the independent Nation of Moskitia.
Met with barely a mention from the world press, a stony silence from Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega and scorn from local government, the indigenous Council of Elders annulled all land contracts with the Nicaraguan government pending renegotiation, cancelled government elections, called for businesses to begin paying tax to them instead of the government authorities and gave the police and military six months to organise an orderly and peaceful withdrawal. Not only have the new ‘government’ already begun work on a currency, a flag and a national anthem they are also backed by the ‘Indigenous Army of Moskitia’, comprised of up to four hundred conflict veterans.
One of the first acts of the ‘Indigenous Army’ was the unarmed takeover of the party headquarters of the political party Yatama – the party which represents the indigenous population in central government and is an ally of the ruling Sandinista party, the FSLN. The party, like the members of the ‘Indigenous Army’, has its origins in the region’s struggle against the Sandinista government in the 1980’s. Following the overthrow of dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979 the Mískito people, the region’s majority indigenous group, found themselves caught up in the conflict between the new revolutionary Sandinista government and US backed militias, the Contras. Those in the firing line faced forced relocation into government camps, arbitrary imprisonment and even disappearances and torture. In response many took up arms, some later to join with the Contras, others independently, in a rebellion that lasted until 1987.
The treatment of the Misqito people was always one noticeable stain on the Sandinista’s less than impressive human rights record, which as well as accusations of arbitary imprisonment and disapearences also included the curtailing of freedom of speech and assembly and the freedom of the press. Most of the Sandinista abuses of the time could at least be put into the context of a conflict with well-armed, foreign-backed and completely ruthless paramilitary organisations which habitually employed the worst kind of terror tactics. The Mískito people, however, just lived in a strategically important location.
The legislation which eventually brought an end to hostilities was the ‘Autonomy of the Caribbean Coast’ law, passed by the Sandinista government in 1987. The law divided the region into two autonomous regions, one in the North – RAAN, and one in the South - RAAS which, in theory, had control of natural resources and a degree of self-determination. In practice any semblance of autonomy quickly came to an end following the 1990 electoral defeat of the Sandinistas and the accession of the conservative Violeta Barrios de Chamarro who had little time for autonomy but a keen interest in the region’s natural resources.
Since then the Mískitos have suffered in poverty. Struggling against an increasingly unpredictable climate and hit hard by natural disasters, the Mískitos have also witnessed the destruction of around 50% of their rainforest in the last 50 years from logging and the pollution of their water supplies with mercury and cyanide by gold mines. The issue of secession first came to attention in 2002 when the Council of Elders declared independence in theory but took no concrete steps to achieve it in practice.
In 2006, Daniel Ortega, leader of the Sandinista party that first fought the Mískitos then granted them autonomy in the 80s, returned to power after 16 years in opposition. Back in the 80s Ortega and the Sandinistas gained world-wide renown following their ousting of the vicious Somoza. While they were demonised by the Americans, with Ronald Reagan labelling Sandinista Nicaragua a “totalitarian dungeon”, they were idolised by many on the left for being a uniquely multi-class, multi-ethnic, multi-doctrinal, and politically pluralistic movement.
In its latest incarnation the Sandinistas have proved to be equally divisive, although for very different reasons. Throughout their years in opposition, Ortega was accused of accumulating personal power by strengthening his grip on the party machinery. This led to a rift in the party with dissidents breaking away to form their own Sandinista party, the Sandinista Renovation Movement (MRS). Unperturbed, Ortega began forging alliances with what had previously been regarded as Sandinista enemies.
The process began in 1999 when Ortega entered into an agreement with Arnoldo Alemán, an official during the Somoza regime who had been elected president in 1997. Amongst other things, the agreement was used to attempt to prevent the prosecution of Alemán on corruption charges and Ortega on charges that he had sexually abused his stepdaughter, Zoilamerica Narvaez.
With the 2006 elections approaching this was followed by Ortega converting to Catholicism – the church had been fierce opponents of the Sandinistas, seeing them as a threat to their traditionally privileged position. He then announced a former contra, Jaime Morales, as his running mate.
Since regaining power Ortega has been attacked for clamping down on democracy. Things reached a head in the November municipal elections when candidates from MRS and the traditional Conservative party were banned from running altogether. International observers were barred from the elections while the tens of thousands of observers from the independent Nicargauan group, Ethics and Transparency, were reduced to trying to observe from outside the polling stations. Even from that distance they estimated that there were irregularities in a third of polling stations and questioned the results which saw a comprehensive win for the FSLN that flew in the face of independent surveys conducted before the election. The perception that the election was fraudulant led to mass street protests which were violently put down.
Ortega has also faced criticism from disillusioned social movements, especially for his stance on women's rights. In the 80's the Sandinista commitment to gender equality saw women play a major role in the movement and in its leadership. Following the 1990 electoral defeat these gains were quickly reversed and by the end of 1991 around 16,000 working women had lost their jobs. Since returning to power, instead of restoring the pre-eminence of women’s struggle for equality, Ortega has pandered to his chauvinistic foes by not only supporting a blanket ban on abortion bill also by persecuting the Autonomous Women’s Movement (MAM) for opposing it.
Nevertheless Ortega's return has a seen the reintroduction of a number of progressive policies; literacy rates are approaching 100%, free health clinics are once again staffed and stocked and the small and medium farming sector has been revived.
The current Ortega government is clearly considerably different in character to the one that battled the Mískito in the early 80s and to the one that signed a peace deal years later. So far it has yet to actively respond to the declaration, perhaps embarrassed by the fact that last year Ortega was the only world leader to recognize the breakaway Russian-backed republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Or maybe they are biding their time waiting to see if the movement finds wider resonance in the region.
The proposed Nation of Moskitia would be divided into seven autonomous regions, reflecting the ethnic diversity of the region which is home to Spanish speaking Mestizos (people of mixed Spanish and indigenous heritage), English speaking Creoles, Garifuna (a Caribbean population of mixed indigenous and African slave heritage) as well as a number of other indigenous groups. This diversity is already presenting the separatists with one of their biggest challenges. While the Mískito are the majority in the Northern region, in the South they form a minority. So far, although Southern Mískito leaders have declared their support for independence, the rest of the regions population has remained detached and silent.
While the national government has yet to comment the regional powers have been considerably more vocal. The Governor of the RAAN, Reynaldo Francis, stated that it is merely a “poorly organised” effort by a “group of old men”. This charge was strongly denied by separatist leader Rev. Hector Williams who has been been elected as Wihta Tara, or 'Great Judge' of Moskitia by the Mískito communities. In response to Francis' comments Williams said, "We are not puppets. We are men. And now we have the weight of a nation on our shoulders."
Whether it proves successful or not, the independence movement of the Mosquito coast is further proof of the increasing rebelliousness of Latin America's indigenous population after 500 years of abuse and exploitation. With an indigenous president in power in Bolivia, the continuing Zapatista autonomous zones in Mexico and mass movements from the Minga in Colombia (see SchNEWS 656) to the continuing protests in Peruvian Amazonia (see SchNEWS 675), Latin America's indigenous peoples are becoming increasingly vocal in demanding not just recognition and resources but also to live in a society organised on different principles, their own principles.


"Miskito Elders Council declares La Mosquitia independent of Nicaragua"
2009-05-12 by Karla Jacobs from "Tortilla con sal" [http://tortillaconsal.com/separatist_miskito_movement.html]:
On April 18th the Elders Council of La Mosquitia (considered the maximum authority of the indigenous Miskito people's traditional organizational structure) held an assembly in Bilwi (Puerto Cabezas) at which they declared the independence of the Northern and Southern Atlantic Regions (RAAN and RAAS) from Nicaragua. The new nation the Elders intend to create will be called the Communitary Nation of La Mosquitia.
During the event at which the surprise announcement was made, Reverend Hector Williams was elected as Gran Wihta Tara, the maximum leader of La Mosquitia and of the authority the Elders now recognize as the legitimate government of the Caribbean region.
Also during the assembly the Council of Elder Ministers assist Williams' government, as was the Indigenous Army of La Mosquitia, a force of approximately 200 former Yatama combatants which was designated the task of defending the independence of La Mosquitia.
[During the 1980s, Yatama, then an indigenous resistance movement, was involved in the armed conflict against the first FSLN government. In the 1990s the movement became a political party and has since participated in several regional and national elections with relative success. Currently Yatama is part of the FSLN led governing political alliance. The members of the Indigenous Army of La Mosquitia, however, expressed their profound discontent with the recent policies and actions of Yatama leader Brooklyn Rivera.]
The Declaration of Independence read during the assembly proposes a six month transition period and issues a formal request for assistance from the UN to carry out this process. The declaration goes on to order the suspension of all political elections and instructs companies operating within the region to desist from their tax payments to Nicaragua's central government and to come to agreements vis a vis tax and other arrangements with the newly proposed authorities.

The Miskito people's troubled recent history -
Until the latter part of the 19th century La Mosquitia (the territories belonging to the Miskito people comprising part of the current northern Nicaraguan and southern Honduran Caribbean regions) was an autonomous region where Miskitos lived relatively peacefully with the English who had colonized certain parts of the coastal region.
In 1894 Nicaraguan President José Santos Zelaya invaded the part of La Mosquitia that today forms Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and obliged a number of representatives of the Miskito people to sign a convention agreeing to become part of Nicaragua. As journalist Sergio Simpson describes in a recent article published on his blog, the Miskito people have, ever since, suffered discrimination, violence, exploitation and disrespect at the hands of their mestizo "co-patriots:" [Mestizo is the term used to describe persons of mixed Nicaraguan-Spanish ancestry]. Sergio Simpson:
"The independentist proposal is not new ... it has existed ever since ... 1894 when President José Santos Zelaya militarily invaded [La Mosquitia] refusing to acknowledge the local autonomous authorities. Mestizo representatives from the Pacific coast turned up, displaced creoles and indigenous persons and imposed their own classist and, of course, racist discriminatory visions. A concept of "civilization" was imposed which established unsurmountable differences between costeños (indigenous people and afrodecendents) and mestizos.
"Since then all the different ... leaders of Nicaragua have signed concessions permitting the exploitation of [the Caribbean coast's] human and natural resources, although such concessions have never permitted indigenous communities to enjoy the benefits of their properties. ... The majority of the indigenous lands were declared as Nicaraguan national territory. ...
"With the triumph of the Popular Sandinista Revolution (1979) the contradictions between the indigenous peoples of the Caribbean and central government were magnified to such an extent that indigenous tribes resorted to armed violence against the government as part of the [Contra] war financed by the US. ... The Law of Autonomy of the Caribbean Coast (Law 28 approved in September 1987) was the product of negotiations between Miskito armed groups and the Sandinista government which, after four years at war, yielded to the pressure and understood the demands [being made by the Miskitos].
"Since the electoral defeat of the FSLN (1990) ... the indigenous territories have suffered the onslaught of individuals anxious to acumulate immediate wealth even if that implies the destruction of large areas of terrain. We see National Army helicopters involved in the destruction of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, local and Pacific leaders investing in timber processing, cattle farming and industrial fishing, thousands of people getting involved in the trafficking and consumption of cocaine, thousands of former soldiers, mestizo contras and land merchants invading the jungle.
"The Miskito people went straight from the suffering of armed conflict to the distress of hunger, loss of communal values, delinquential violence, the increasing deterioration of their natural and environmental resources and the corruption of indigenous leaders."

Authorities and media, apparently taken a back, await further events -
Although the general discontent of the Miskito and other indigenous peoples is a well known, if little understood, phenomenon in Nicaragua, the proclamation of independence on April 18th came as a surprise to Nicaraguan authorities and society alike. So far central and regional government representatives have said very little in public about the implications of the Elder's announcement or how they plan to react. Similarly national media outlets (admittedly all based in Pacific urban centers) have published little about events in the Caribbean regions. There is a sense in which the generalized silence surrounding events suggests that people are waiting anxiously to see how serious the Elder's council is about its proclamation, and what is going to happen next.   
According to Wilfredo Jarquín Lang, Special Ombudsman for Indigenous People and Ethnic Communities for the RAAS, the Miskito Elders Council's separatist aspirations are not shared by the rest of the indigenous peoples and other communities of the Caribbean region. This was certainly the inexplicit intepretation the FSLN party political periodical, El 19, made of the Sumu Mayangna Nation General Assembly celebrated in the town of Rosita, RAAN, at the beginning of May, during which new authorities were elected in the presence of central and regional government representatives.
Special Ombudsman for Indigenous People and Ethnic Communities for the RAAN, Violeta Irías Nelson, is of the opinion that, whether or not the Miskito Elders Council is acting in representation of majority regional opinion, the decision "not to recognize the established authorities, and the formation of the Indigenous Army of La Mosquitia, could be bad signs."
Brooklyn Rivera, a National Assembly Deputy and leader of the indigenous party Yatama (which, as mentioned above, is allied with the FSLN), coincides with Irías' fear. "As long as whichever government is in power fails to attend to the demands and aspirations of [the people of the Caribbean regions] those demands will gain more and more force," says Rivera. "As inhabitants of [the Caribbean regions] we acknowledge that the [separatist movement] could gain broad support from all sectors. ... Although the proclamation of independence is juridically weak, the eventual cultural and political impact could provoke large forces to rebel and create a serious conflictive situation."
Secretary of Indigenous Affairs at the Nicaraguan Foreign Ministry, Joel Dixon, minimized the Elders' Council announcement saying "it doesn't even have the full support of the Miskito people, let alone the other peoples" (mayangna, garifuna, rama, creole and mestizo). Dixon believes that beneath the announced aspiration of independence lies another objective - to undermine the leadership of Rivera within Yatama and among the region's population as a whole.
No explanation of any diplomatic or other response to the Elders Council's announcement was given by Dixon, the only central government official to have publicly commented on recent events. Undeniably, if the Miskito communal authorities were to go ahead with their announced plan to establish an independent nation, Nicaragua's central government would be faced with a very difficult and potentially explosive situation. The very existence of the Indigenous Army of La Mosquitia violates the Nicaraguan constitution which states that the only armed forces legally permitted to exist are the Nicaraguan Army and the National Police.

Possible manipulation of Miskitos by underground forces -
As could be expected a number of conspiracy theories have been put forward about who and what superior forces are behind the surprise separatist announcement. In an article which appeared on the right wing news and information website,www.nicaraguahoy.info, run from Costa Rica, Roberto Escobedo Caicedo claims that agents of both the Colombian government and Colombian drug cartels are involved in underground campaigns to encourage separatist aspirations among Miskitos. The former, he says, are doing so with the intention of avoiding Nicaragua's claim against Colombia over the maritime border the two nation's share coming to fruition at the International Court of Justice, while the latter are interested in creating the conditions to install a cocaine trafficking haven.
Meanwhile, during comments to a national TV news program, FSLN Deputy Gustavo Porras expressed his suspicion that US Ambassador Robert Callahan is the one behind the formation of the separatist Miskito movement. Porras cited Callahan's experience as US Embassy spokesmen in Honduras during the 1980s, during which time he assisted John Negroponte in coordinating the Contra war against the FSLN government. "And I understand that he [helped organize separatist movements] in Yugoslavia," Porras went on.
Going on publicly available information, it is as yet impossible to come to any sort of conclusion about whether some underground force with sinister intentions is behind the Elders Council's recent actions, or what the possible outcome of the situation may be. One can but hope that the Council is motivated by a genuine desire to help the Miskito and other peoples of Nicaragua's Caribbean coastal regions overcome their current situation of desperate impoverishment and marginalization. It would be naïve, however, to overlook the attractiveness the extreme social and political vulnerability of the region (the poorest and least developed of Central America) would represent, in terms of being a potential punto de entrada, for groups interested in destabilizing the country and its central government.


"Campaigning against the Patuca Dam, Honduras"
2000-08 Tearfund Advocacy case study by Graham Gordon, Tearfund Policy Officer, and Osvaldo Munguia, Director, MOPAWI [http://tilz.tearfund.org/~/media/Files/TILZ/Topics/Advocacy%20case%20study%20-%20Mopawi%20Honduras.pdf]:
Background -
MOPAWI is an NGO that began in 1985, based  in La Moskitia region of Honduras, Central  America. This is a vast expanse of pristine rain  forest with many protected areas. When  MOPAWI started work there they discovered  that the indigenous people believed that the land  they lived on was theirs, when in fact it was  classed as national land. This meant that  nobody had secure tenure and that anyone could  ´peacefully´ settle on the land and, after some  years, claim it as their own. Therefore one of  the first actions that MOPAWI were involved in  was to create awareness over land tenure and  help people to organise themselves at  community level to be granted land rights. The  indigenous population has been in negotiations  with the government for nearly 10 years.

Patuca Dam project -
Honduras cannot supply enough electricity to  serve the current needs of its population and,  since the 1960s, the government has been  collecting detailed data from the Patuca River in  La Moskitia to consider whether it would be a  suitable source for hydroelectric power. There  was already a dam in operation in a different  part of the country but, during a very long dry  season in 1994, it had to dramatically decrease  its production of electricity and rationing was  introduced. Since then Honduras has needed to  buy electricity from neighbouring countries and  the government has been under pressure from  these countries and from its own industry to  develop its own secure source of electricity.  In 1996 the government contracted two North  American Companies to build a dam on the  Patuca River, and granted them concessions to  sell electricity back to them for the following 40  years. Therefore, with one slight of hand, the  government had effectively provided natural  resource rights to foreign companies, whereas  10 years of ´negotiations´ with the indigenous  population had produced no results.  The companies hired an agency from Costa Rica  to undertake an environmental impact  assessment to consider the likely effects of the  proposed dam on the environment and the  people there. This took 6 weeks to complete and there were fears that it was rushed through  so that the dam could start as quickly as  possible.

MOPAWI’s concerns -
MOPAWI were concerned that this dam would  have devastating consequences on La Moskitia: 
- The dam would prevent the river from  flooding, prevent the land becoming  fertilised, and thus reduce food production. 
- The Patuca River is the main form of  transportation in the region and the dam  would lower the water levels and make it  more difficult for boats to pass up and  down. 
- A new road was planned which would have  opened it up for migration of people into  the region, threatening the land rights of  the indigenous population, putting pressure  on an already fragile ecosystem and  increasing logging. 
- The electricity was for the main industrial  cities and La Moskitia would have been the  last place in the country to receive a  constant supply.
There was also evidence from a geologist that,  with the high annual rainfall and a fragile  ecosystem that is prone to erosion, the dam  would be blocked after only a few years. The  result would therefore have been environmental  destruction but with no ongoing supply of  electricity to show for it.

Advocacy action -
- networking with organisations. The first  step for MOPAWI was to work with other  concerned groups to form a coalition including  environmental groups, indigenous peoples  groups and local government representatives.  Due to mobilising the population over the  previous issues of land rights, the people were  organised and accustomed to representing  themselves at every level. 
- working with the community. At the same  time they became involved in many popular  awareness-raising activities. These included  seminars with people in La Moskitia, a weekly  programme on the national radio with a phone in discussion, and a press conference with the  Honduras media. 
- lobbying at government level. They also  met with the government and the companies  involved to discuss the issues and represent their  concerns. This was done in private meetings as  well as through holding a public forum in the  capital city to which the government,  companies, indigenous groups, environmental  groups and the media were invited. 
- working at international level. Early in 1997  MOPAWI contacted partner organisations in  the UK, such as Tearfund, and in the US, such  as the Native Lands Group and the  International Rivers Network. MOPAWI asked  them to put external pressure on the Honduran  government and on the companies to halt the  plans for the dam.

Objectives of the campaign -
The coalition demanded the following action be  taken: 
- an environmental impact assessment of at least  18 months so that the likely effects on the  environment and animals could be understood  during all of the different seasons 
- serious investigation of all alternative  possibilities for providing power in the region 
- granting the Patuca Region the status as a  protected area 
- granting communal land rights to the  indigenous population

What happened? 
The proposed dam became a subject of national  interest and the construction companies,  concerned that it may not have been a good  investment, were more eager to talk, even  though they were still planning to go ahead with  the construction.  The coalition did not merely complain about the  proposed dam but they tried to find alternative  solutions. They recognised the need for  electricity and showed that a series of smaller  dams could be built throughout the country to  provide more electricity. They also showed how  through biomass, solar and wind energy,  Honduras could produce enough electricity for  the whole population.

Personal danger -
The campaign was not without its danger to  those involved. Carlos Luna, the mayor of one  of the municipalities in the Patuca Region, was  found killed in his office. He was an  enthusiastic supporter of the campaign to protect the Patuca National Park and it is  thought his death is connected in some way to  this.

Hurricane Mitch -
In October 1998 Hurricane Mitch tore through  Honduras, causing untold destruction to homes  and the environment. For more than 150  kilometres along the Patuca River huge swathes  of the river bank and thousands of trees were  completely washed away. There were  mountains of trees and extensive silting along  the riverbed. A subsequent impact study  showed that, even if the dam had withstood the  force of the hurricane and resulting river flow, it  would have received so much silt and debris that  it would have been unusable.

Hurricane Mitch -
In October 1998 Hurricane Mitch tore through  Honduras, causing untold destruction to homes  and the environment. For more than 150  kilometres along the Patuca River huge swathes  of the river bank and thousands of trees were  completely washed away. There were  mountains of trees and extensive silting along  the riverbed. A subsequent impact study  showed that, even if the dam had withstood the  force of the hurricane and resulting river flow, it  would have received so much silt and debris The situation now  In March 1999 the companies involved officially  withdrew their involvement with the dam  project. They said this was due to the level of  local opposition. It must also be in part due to  their realisation that the project was unworkable.  However, the government still has plans to build  the dam and is looking for other partners.  Apart from stopping the project for the  moment, the campaign has enabled the people  in La Moskitia to be better organised, it has  strengthened the environmental movement in  Honduras as a whole and more people are  supportive of protecting natural forests.that  it would have been unusable.

The Future -
The coalition is ready to deal with future  proposals to build the dam. MOPAWI are still  working with the indigenous communities and  the government for land rights to be granted to  the indigenous communities. When this  happens they will be in a much stronger position  to prevent unwanted development and to  control their own future.


ALBA - Republic of Nicaragua - RAAN

"Nicaraguan Voters Deepen 21st Century Socialism on all Fronts" 
2012-02-01 interview with Felipe Stuart Cournoyer by John Riddell from "Axis of Logic"[http://axisoflogic.com/artman/publish/Article_64289.shtml]
[ ... ]
 Riddell: How are government relations with Nicaragua’s indigenous peoples?
Stuart: This is an important achievement of the government. Under the first FSLN government, in the 1980s, the constitution incorporated measures for indigenous autonomy, including assuring these peoples of a share of natural resources revenue. After the FSLN was defeated in 1990, the new governments refused to pass enabling legislation. Now that has been done. Indigenous communal lands have won recognition. The FSLN has a strategic alliance with Yatama, the main indigenous party, which governs the North Atlantic Autonomous Region (RAAN). Indigenous representatives are also represented in the National government.
[ ... ]


"How was neo-Nazi cop hired?"
2012-04-26 letter by Mark White to the editor of "Tico Times" [http://www.ticotimes.net/Opinion/Letters-to-the-Editor/Previous-Letters/How-was-neo-Nazi-cop-hired]:
Dear Tico Times:    Can someone please explain to me how a boneheaded neo-Nazi ends up on the National Police force? Someone had to know this guy was a nut job. Yet they hired him, gave him a gun and badge, and assigned him the task of protecting citizens.     The fact that he is complaining about being unjustly fired and persecuted is the best part. Poor soul. Can’t work because he has “White Power” tattooed on his arm. I feel bad for his kids.    Yes, Costa Rica needs more cops and it’s good that they’re putting more on the streets. But they should be vetted better. If you see a cop with a swastika tattoo, are you going to feel safe?