Inaction Not An Option to Latin America’s Eco-Activists Struggle Against Corporate Feudalism, Colonialism & Resource Scarcity
/On Jan. 12, Isidro Baldenegro López traveled to his hometown for the first time in years to visit his aunt who had fallen gravely ill. As he lay down to sleep that Saturday night in Coloradas de la Virgen, a small community in the western Sierra Madre mountains of Chihuahua, Mexico, he heard a man call his name repeatedly.
When he got up to see who was there, Baldenegro was shot six times. The young gunman casually walked away when the deed was done, leaving his victim for dead. Baldenegro succumbed to his wounds hours later, dying around 1 a.m. on Jan. 16.
He lived humbly as a subsistence farmer, but Baldenegro was an internationally renowned environmental activist. One of just four Mexicans to receive the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, Baldenegro made a name for himself as a principled activist who was falsely imprisoned, threatened, and eventually murdered for his fight to protect the native forest and his indigenous community from predatory logging interests infecting much of Latin America, a struggle he inherited from his father who was also murdered for his activism.
Isidro Baldenegro’s work inspired activists throughout Latin America and the world, bringing international attention to the ecological wonder of the Sierra Madre’s old-growth forests as well as the fight for survival of the Tarahumara people and their rich cultural heritage.
Equally stunning as his sudden, grisly murder was the negligence of the government response, prompting many locals and international observers to allege that such carelessness was intentional. After news of Baldenegro’s death circulated, authorities did not go to retrieve his body, leaving one of his brothers to bring his remains to state police.
In the weeks since the murder, not a single authority — municipal, state, or federal — has visited the community to investigate the incident or look for Baldenegro’s killer.
A tragic, but increasingly common reality
The story of Isidro Baldenegro López, however tragic, is an increasingly common reality for Latin American environmental activists and indigenous leaders who often find themselves in the crosshairs of powerful multinational corporations and the elite who control them and the political class. These interests, as they have done for centuries, place profit over people and have cultivated violence within indigenous regions as a means of quelling dissent.
In the case of México, the drug war initiated by former President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa in 2006 made violence the norm in Chihuahua, the region where Baldenegro lived and died. In the last decade, this “war” has left over 100,000 murdered and tens of thousands disappeared while also creating an organized crime network involving CIA-connected drug traffickers, politicians, and logging interests. Logging interests have become particularly powerful in the region, especially post-NAFTA, largely because U.S. companies have come to rely on the region as a source of raw materials. These same logging interests are widely believed by locals to be responsible for Baldenegro’s murder.
In an interview with journalist John Gibler for Sierra magazine, Isela González of the Sierra Madre Alliance said:
“We are wounded and outraged by Isidro’s murder, but we don’t want for people to think that the violence was aimed only at this one individual: This is violence waged against the indigenous communities who have been struggling for years to protect their ancestral territories.”
In Latin America, an average of two activists are killed every week, a gruesome statistic that has only worsened in recent years, according to Oxfam. Despite the constant threats to their lives, many of these activists know that staying silent and giving in to the short-sighted demands of both industry and government would consign them and their communities to annihilation, ultimately giving them little choice in the matter.
For years, experts and analysts have warned of coming wars over natural resources as years of industrialization and increasing resource scarcity have left major industries scrambling for the rights to the remaining supplies of key raw materials. Yet, for Latin America, these wars have long been a harsh reality, largely the legacy of ongoing and centuries-old conflicts between indigenous communities and colonialist governments over national resources. Originally perfected by the Spanish in the colonial era, the strategy of using intimidation and fear in order to force local communities to accept a foreign agenda is a fundamental extension of colonialism, showing that colonialism in Latin America has never died but merely changed form.
Largely due to foreign meddling in Latin American affairs, particularly by the United States, several nations — most notably, Honduras, Brazil, and Peru — have made the choice to brutally repress eco-activists instead of listening to their concerns, preferring to clear the path for unregulated industrial exploitation as opposed to any potentially inclusive solution. They also have sizable police forces and even paramilitary groups that target any group that stands in the way of industrial “progress.”
Baldenegro’s death is just the tip of the iceberg. [MORE]
