Mangrove forest on the island of Nusa Lembongan in Indonesia / credit: Joel Vodell on Unsplash
More than 10.3 million acres of primary tropical forests—spanning about the size of Belgium—went up in flames in 2020. A new coalition claims it will mobilize $1 billion to thwart global climate change’s increasingly devastating forest fires. But scientists and other experts have raised doubts about this new program corporations and governments have kicked off.
Primary tropical forests are untouched by human development. More than 1 billion people live in and depend on the world’s tropical forests, and nearly 300 million people live in lands targeted for tropical forest restoration, according to Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a non-governmental organization. Meanwhile, RRI’s data shows over 900 million people live in the biodiverse areas of low- and middle-income countries.
The new coalition is called “Lowering Emissions by Accelerating Forest finance”—or LEAF—and it is expected to become “the single largest private-sector investment to protect tropical forests.” At the Leaders Summit on Climate on April 22, multinational corporations entered into a coalition with the governments of the United States, the United Kingdom and Norway. The list of corporations includes Airbnb, Amazon, Bayer, Boston Consulting Group, GlaxoSmithKline, McKinsey & Company, Nestle, Salesforce and Unilever.
Experts have raised this coalitional strategy could further marginalize communities dwelling in tropical forests across the developing world. They also have questioned the effectiveness of strategies that aim to raise funding to halt deforestation.
For example, Forrest Fleischman, an assistant professor of forest resources at the University of Minnesota, says the success of the LEAF coalition will depend “not on their ability to mobilize money from wealthy companies, but in their ability to negotiate complicated political arrangements which may involve challenging the powers that be, including states and private companies.
How Has Carbon Finance Worked?
Political and economic conditions create opportunities for power plays in carbon finance, i.e. the funding provided for carbon sequestration programs like forest restoration. In most cases, governments, corporations and aid organizations have immense discretionary power regarding carbon finance. That is why experts say Indigenous and other forest-dependent peoples should have primary decision-making power over monetary allocations, as well as the power to choose projects.
Not involving such communities can erode their rights. For example, consider how afforestation programs in India have been carried out on lands used for agricultural purposes by Indigenous and forest-dwelling communities.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, former United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, says forest conservation programs like LEAF “cannot work if the rights of Indigenous communities are not protected and the flow of money only leads to violence and conflicts” because of struggles over land rights. More specifically, she highlights a need to ensure land rights of forest-dwelling communities are recognized and that these communities play an active role in designing the LEAF program, as well as receive a fair share of the resources LEAF aims to gather.
Indigenous communities, such as the Yurok tribe in what is known as northern California, the Suquamish tribe in what is known as the Seattle, Washington area, as well as the U.S.-based Indigenous Environmental Network, could not be reached for comment, as of press time.
Fleischman also emphasizes LEAF’s aim ought to be to “transform the economic and political conditions surrounding forests, rather than just setting up conservation areas and providing payments to people.”
As for effectiveness, past efforts offer lessons.
“In Brazil, deforestation is a major source of emissions. So, it is important to have [internationally mobilized] resources to fight the climate crisis. But, at the same time, we worry when we hear about new funds to support forests because we have seen how the Amazon Fund has been used,” says Maureen Santos, policy officer at Federation of Organizations for Social and Educational Assistance in Rio de Janeiro.
Santos adds President Jair Bolsonaro’s government has failed to use the fund as a climate change tool. Deforestation rates in the Amazon have surged under Bolsonaro.
The Amazon Fund is a REDD+ initiative the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) recognizes. “REDD” stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. The aim here is to provide economic incentives for forest conservation. But reports have pointed to high deforestation rates in the Amazon basin, even after the Amazon Fund was fully operationalized.
Pays to note a leading partner at LEAF is the United States, which is the biggest historical emitter of CO2. “Initiatives like LEAF have to be followed up with stronger initiatives to reduce emissions, because even if you save all the forests in the world, you cannot solve the climate crisis until you stop emissions,” Santos adds.
Recognizing Land Rights and Asymmetrical Power
A recent paper that analyzed what happened with the Yurok tribe, who occupy the redwood forest of northern California in the United States. The tribe obtained funding to enable carbon sequestration on ancestral territory. This is different than what is known as the “Indian model,” which includes large-scale plantation drives by the government under the Paris Agreement and other forest conservation, afforestation and reforestation efforts funded by international agencies like the World Bank.
The paper highlights when land managers and users possess enforceable rights, like in the case of the Yurok tribe, “power is balanced, accountability is clear, authorities represent the interests of the broader user community and carbon storage aligns with local interests.”
In India, the report found, forest carbon finance is controlled by state governments who “do not share benefits of carbon finance with the rural forest-dependent people whose actions play a major role in determining the outcomes of these programs.”
Communities dependent on forests also lacked countervailing power because their rights to forest land are not recognized.
One of the key findings of the paper is mobilizing money is not enough to ensure forest protection. This is because a wide variety of influences impact forest conservation, many of which are not directly related to financial incentives. Fleischman, the lead author of the paper says, “We’ve long recognised that insecure land tenure is a major driver of forest loss, however it is not clear how giving a country or state money leads to securing land tenure for poor or marginalized people.”
Financial investment, including ones that aim to promote forest conservation, do not work out well. This occurs, Fleischman explains, in cases where financial investments in land end up undermining secure land tenure, which then leads to land degradation. When land values increase, owing to interest from international funding agencies, power actors like companies, states and NGOs are incentivized to control land-based revenue by grabbing land for themselves. This process forcibly takes away the land rights of rural and Indigenous people.
The problems that arise from not recognizing land titles extends to Brazil, too.
Santos adds the first priority ought to be to ensure community land rights are recognized, and environmental regulations and oversight mechanisms are strong enough to assess the success and failures of proposals like LEAF.
Organizations that monitor land use, such as Land Conflict Watch and Vasundhara in India, as well as Amazon Watch, could not be reached for comment.
The Path Ahead
“Substantial investment in the recognition of Indigenous and community land rights is a prerequisite to the global climate agenda,” concluded a study published in June by Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI). The authors looked at 31 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, which hold 70 percent of the world’s tropical forests to highlight risks in developing carbon markets without first settling the land rights of Indigenous communities.
Bryson Ogden, associate director for strategic analysis & global engagement at Rights and Resources Group—the secretariat for RRI—notes “serious power imbalances” in the geographies where the LEAF Coalition plans to operate. He adds power imbalances between companies and governments on the one hand, and rural communities on the other, “often exacerbated by insecure land tenure, have driven land-grabs and violations in the past, and more recently, hindered efforts to eliminate supply chain-driven deforestation.”
In response to concerns about power asymmetries and land rights, Emergent Media, administrative coordinator of LEAF Coalition, told Toward Freedom that LEAF participants recognize Indigenous peoples and local communities are “essential stakeholders in the design and implementation” of plans to reduce deforestation and maintain forest cover in the jurisdictions where they live.
Emergent Media noted safeguards have been drawn up to ensure protection and respect of land-tenure rights and effective stakeholder participation. They also added these safeguards are based on the Cancun Safeguards drafted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).
But doubts still remain. Nothing is concrete in either publicly available documents about the coalition, nor in its statement that Indigenous and local people are directly involved in the design and evaluation of projects. Fleischman pointed out it seems like the coalition is treating Indigenous and forest-dependent people “as secondary people who need to be protected in projects designed and financed by others, as opposed to directly empowering those people to make decisions about their lands.”
The kind of economic and political changes that are needed to “ensure [forest] conservation when it conflicts with the profits of companies and the interests of national governments” are left lacking, Fleischman says.
Ogden of RRI suggests a just way to achieve emission-reduction aims would be to scale-up the legal recognition of customary land and resource rights of forest communities—including the carbon stored therein—across proposed accounting areas; develop operational feedback and grievance redress mechanisms; and adequately involve affected constituencies in the design of benefit sharing plans.
The question remains of whether the $1 billion LEAF proposes to raise is enough to conserve tropical forests around the world.
“To the extent that money can address conservation challenges, the quantity of money may need to be much larger to make a real dent. In other words, if money is what matters, the money may need to be roughly equivalent to the potential profits to be made by clearing forests to grow soybeans or palm oil,” Fleischman says.
Rishika Pardikar is a freelance journalist in Bangalore, India.
A Canadair firefighting aircraft from the Sicilian fire brigade sprays water onto a fire heading toward the Zingaro natural reserve in Sicily / credit: Antonio Cascio
SCORACE FOREST, Italy—On August 18, in the Italian region of Sicily, the Scorace Forest caught fire. Around 90 percent of the 750 hectares (1,853 acres) of vegetation were scorched.
“That day, I saw people crying as we looked at the forest burning. Some of them were people that have contributed to planting the trees, and people that have worked in the forest for many years,” recalled Cristoforo Mustazza, a grape and wine producer in Buseto, a town that neighbors the Scorace Forest. “I was also worried about my vineyard, but I had a small loss in comparison to what happened to the forest.”
Over the last 14 years, Sicily has reported more than half of Italy’s wooden (and non-wooden) burned area. That is an extraordinary figure considering the Mediterranean island represents only 8.5 percent of the country’s land.
In the Scorace Forest, two forest guards cut down burned trees that pose a risk to passers-by. Trees with brown leaves (background) had been burned in wildfires / credit: Antonio Cascio
Beyond Sicily, wildfires are a global issue. According to a recent study published by forest-monitoring platform Global Forest Watch, in association with the University of Maryland, fires have intensified over the last 20 years. Between 2001 and 2021, 437 million hectares (more than 1 billion acres)—or 11 percent—of tree cover was lost around the world.
This not only affects biodiversity and human settlements close by. The greenhouse gasses emitted exacerbate the current climate crisis. From 2001 to 2021, 174 gigatons (174 billion tons) of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere due to wildfires, explains the GFW report. That is a quantity that can be compared to the weight of 1.74 million fully loaded U.S. aircraft carriers.
Although the causes for the increase in fires are diverse, it is clear climate change exacerbates the wildfire crisis, explained Giuseppe Barbera, professor of agrarian and forestal science at Palermo University in Sicily’s capital city.
Besides that, many small farmers have abandoned the countryside because farming has become an increasingly fruitless endeavor. Plus, the Sicilian government has neglected the planning required to maintain artificial forests, Barbera said. Artificial forests can include non-native and/or native tree species, and they differ from natural forests in composition and structure, among other factors, according to a textbook, Tropical Biology and Conservation Management.
Sicily is a Mediterranean island of around 5 million inhabitants that has long been a crossroads between Europe and Africa. It is characterized by warm weather and beautiful beaches that attract millions of tourists every year. However, Sicilians endure fire hazards caused by high temperatures combined with “scirocco,” a hot wind that can reach hurricane speeds while carrying dust or rain from northern Africa.
Farmer and wine producer Cristoforo Mustazza, 43, from Buseto, checks the state of his vineyard after it had been burned by the Scorace Forest wildfire / credit: Antonio Cascio
How Agriculture Can Prevent Fires
Alongside tourism, Sicily’s economy relies on agriculture for local consumption as well as for export. Leading products include olives, grapes, peaches, citrus fruits and cereals. However, over the last two decades, agricultural production has declined.
According to data by ISTAT (Italy’s National Institute of Statistics), the number of farms decreased by 37.1 percent between 2000 and 2010; vineyards by 9.5 percent; and olive groves by 3.5 percent. Data for the last decade will be available soon, but further declines are likely. “[Agriculture] does not produce enough economic benefits,” Barbera said.
A study recently published in the Remoting Sensing journal points to other experts having “suggested that abandoned agricultural land can increase fuel continuity and consequently increase fire spread.” The authors of the recent paper went on to write, “There is also evidence that agricultural areas that are typically grazed or tilled annually (e.g., olive orchards) decrease wildfire activity by decreasing surface fuel continuity.”
All of this means regularly tilled land acts as a buffer against wildfires.
Giovanni Magaddino, 60, head of the Scorace Forest Squad in front of a burned cabin, which he helped build. The structure was considered a symbol of the forest / credit: Antonio Cascio
Palermo University’s Barbera concurs, describing farmers like Mustazza as the environment’s “main caretaker” because they are personally interested in avoiding wildfires. “Good farmers carry out many environmental and cultural functions that benefit society as a whole.”
Mustazza is one of the farmers resisting a reduction in income in a highly competitive wine market, as well as other adversities such as this year’s fire. He estimated the blazes caused a loss of 10,000 euros ($10,248) as about a hectare of cork oak and part of the vineyards on his property were destroyed. He will not receive any compensation from the government.
Studies in other countries, such as in Greece and Portugal, tell similar stories.
A Sicilian forest guard fighting a fire on August 15. That day, a strong sirocco wind, a hot and dusty gust from northern Africa, as well as a temperature above 110 degrees Fahrenheit facilitated the rapid spread of fires across the island / credit: Antonio Cascio
How to Effectively Manage a Forest
Sicily has 238 Natura 2000 sites, a network of nature protection areas in the European Union. Within Sicily’s 470,000 hectares of EU protected areas is the Scorace Forest, deemed so because of its environmental and social value. Its vegetation is characterized by native cork oak trees. Yet, like in many other natural areas of Sicily, non-native species, such as pine, eucalyptus and cypress have been introduced over the years. Conifers—for instance, pine—often generate a fire hazard, said Palermo University Professor Donato Salvatore La Mela, an expert in agrarian and forestal science.
“Reforestation has not only been done with inadequate species, but has also lacked a management plan,” he said. “We should take these mistakes as an example for the future, therefore selecting autochthonous [indigenous] species that are more resilient to fires.”
In this sense, the cork oak tree is crucial in the Mediterranean, as its thick and insulating bark resists fires.
“Here, we can see that the leaves of the cork oak are regrowing,” explained Giovanni Magaddino, head of the forest squad in Scorace, as he escorted this reporter and photographer through the charred landscape. “The problem is pine trees and cypresses. The part of [this] ecosystem that has only these two species will not recover.”
Planting a million trees is not the answer and sometimes can be counterproductive, Barbera said, underlining the importance of “planting the right species in the right place, always under continuous supervision.”
A member (on left) of the Sicilian Region Forestry Corps attempts to stop a fire from spreading across the Monte Sparagio mountain, which is designated as a Natura 2000 site, making it part of a network of European Union protected areas / credit: Antonio Cascio
Developing a New Generation of Farmers and Forestry Experts
As an autonomous region, Sicily has its own Forestry Corporation that is in charge of preventing fires and managing forests. However, according to La Mela, “[it] has been reduced from 1,200 people to 300, and all of them will retire over the next few years.”
“I hope that, in the future, young people come to work [in the Forestry Corporation]. Right now, we are all elderly, from 55 onwards and the majority are over 60,” the forest squad’s Magaddino said, adding, “No new people have been admitted since 1996.”
Bringing young energy into fire prevention in Sicily is essential, not only within the forest squad working on the ground, but also in regional planning programs. According to Barbera, 700 people have specialized in silviculture, but there are no working opportunities for them in Sicily.
“These young people could work towards a fire preventive management plan,” the professor said. “However, they have to migrate to find employment in their area of expertise.”
Agricultural work also is not being taken up at the same rate. The European Commission reported “more than 45 percent of farmers [in Sicily] are over 60 years of age and 12 percent are managed by farmers under 40.”
A helicopter from the Italian Army intervened August 2 in the first fire of this year in the Scorace Forest / credit: Antonio Cascio
Meanwhile, this year’s fire in the Scorace Forest is far from an isolated case.
“When fires re-appear in the same area, it is more difficult for the forest to regenerate itself due to soil degradation, sometimes even leading to desertification,” La Mela explained.
Integrating the community, local producers, and youngsters could have a positive effect on fire prevention and perhaps reduce the costs of firefighting. In 2021, the region of Sicily spent almost 3 million euros ($3.1 million) on aerial firefighting. State resources that go into all of Italy’s regions, however, reached up to 59 million euros (almost $61 million) during the same period.
“It is important to carry out a planning program to decide in what areas should agriculture be reintroduced and what areas should be left alone as natural areas,” La Mela said, adding that social and economic sustainability should be considered.
Natalia Torres Garzongraduated with an M.Sc. in Globalization and Development from the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, United Kingdom. She is a freelance journalist who focuses on social and political issues in Latin America, especially in connection to Indigenous communities, women and the environment. With photographer Antonio Cascio, she founded the radio-photography program, Radio Rodando. Her work has been published in the section Planeta Futuro from El País, New Internationalist and Earth Island.
A demonstration in March 2022 against Canada-based mining company Libero Copper and Gold in Mocoa, the capital of the Putumayo department in Colombia. The banner reads, “Mocoa says no to megamineria. Water is worth more than copper.” The march initiated a four-day event called the Festival in Defense of the Mountain, Water and Life, held to protest the company’s copper mining project / credit: Antonio Cascio
MOCOA, Colombia—“We are experiencing a profound crisis, not only in the Amazon, but throughout [the world],” said Campo Elías de la Cruz, a Catholic priest and environmental activist. “Over three centuries, the umbilical cord of Mother Earth has been cut.”
De la Cruz, who opposes the extraction of minerals in Colombia’s Putumayo Department, referred to thousands of rubber trees that had been cut down, along with 70,000 Indigenous people who died in the western Amazon during the extraction of rubber, timber, oil and quinine (a substance used to prevent malaria). “And today,” de la Cruz told Toward Freedom, “in the 21st century, they tell us they are taking the copper from Mother Earth.” The priest remarked on contemporary plans to explore and mine for copper and molybdenum to feed “clean energy” technologies in what could be one of the largest deposits of these minerals on the continent and in the world.
An Andean Saddle-Back Tamarin monkey (Leontocebus fuscicollis) in the Mocoa area. The biodiverse Putumayo department is home to more than 150 animal species, which is why environmentalist groups worry about mining activities / credit: Antonio Cascio
In this richly biodiverse region, where the cool mountains of the Andes meet the steamy Amazon rainforest, opinions are divided and emotions fume over the environmental and social costs of housing a “green” mining project. It is here where the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers originate, both major tributaries of the Amazon River. Any alteration of the natural state of this area is likely to impact the entire Amazon rainforest, often referred to as the “lungs” of the Earth, for absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing life-giving oxygen into the atmosphere.
All this is why a Canadian mining company appearing to move forward on exploring mining possibilities in Putumayo has raised questions about a progressive government that won power by promising environmental protection.
Mocoa city, capital of Putumayo. Its geographic position puts it at high risk of natural disasters. In 2017, for example, a landslide destroyed part of the city and caused more than 300 deaths. For this reason, residents are concerned about mining activities in the mountains that surround Mocoa / credit: Antonio Cascio
‘Clean Energy’ Promises
In 2018, the Canadian multinational company Libero Copper and Gold acquired four mining titles to explore and extract minerals, such as copper and molybdenum, in more than 11,000 hectares (27,000 acres) in Mocoa, the capital of the department of Putumayo in southern Colombia.
The proposal to extract copper and molybdenum has been framed by proponents as a “green” project that can help transition Colombia to using renewable energy and replace polluting fossil fuels, the use of which has been found to cause climate change. This proposal aligns with the policy of the progressive government of Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who took power last year. During his campaign, he vowed to stop issuing oil and gas exploration licenses and has recently advocated for the exploration of crucial minerals in the country to develop renewable energy as a climate change solution.
Map of Colombian city of Mocoa and Mocoa River in Putumayo department / source: Google
Libero Copper and Gold has gained support among locals—most of whom work with the company—because of the jobs and development it promises for a region that lacks access to basic services such as an adequate health system and a reliable water supply. However, the region’s history with oil extraction produced no benefits for the people, either, according to José Luis Lopez, a researcher at the Observatory of Environmental Conflicts at the National University of Colombia, in an interview with Toward Freedom.
A stone that contains copper found in the Tosoy stream, close to the mining project area. Locals say no fish live in this stream because of the high levels of water mineralization. Humans do not consume the water, either. To them, this shows how mining could lead to the contamination of water, affecting human settlements and biodiversity / credit: Antonio Cascio
“Currently, 46 percent of the economy of Putumayo depends on oil exploitation. Yet, between 2008 and 2016, formal employment only reached 26 percent,” Lopez said, citing a study carried out by Fedesarrollo for Ecopetrol, the largest oil company in the country.
In an effort to show how “green” this project is, Libero Copper and Gold created an alliance with the National University of Colombia in Medellin as part of their “Green Route” strategy. This alliance aims to create the first copper production chain in the country for the development of electric motors and generators. However, Congress members denounced the project because of conflicts of interests that led Vice-Minister of Mines and Energy Giovanny Franco Sepulveda to resign early this year.
According to Lopez, Libero Copper and Gold’s discourse lacks consistency. “First, they told us this could be the biggest mine in the world. Later, they focused on a strategy based on social responsibility and environmental sustainability. And, now, they present a plan to extract copper in small quantities.”
Libero Copper and Gold reported the reserves contain 4.6 billion pounds (2 million tons) of copper and 510.5 million pounds (232 kilotons) of molybdenum, exceeding the amount contained in the biggest mines in the world.
The Nasa Indigenous Guards and other participants at the Festival in Defense of the Mountain, Water and Life. The Indigenous Guards said they found evidence that Libero Copper and Gold was drilling with suspended mining titles. They also accused the Canadian company of illegal activities that have caused environmental damage / credit: Antonio Cascio
Beyond the environmental consequences, local people also worry this mining project could cause an environmental disaster similar to the one that took place in Mocoa in 2017, when intense rain led to a mudslide that caused the deaths of more than 300 people. Although the 2017 disaster was linked to the movement of Earth in a different area to where Libero Copper operates, geologists have confirmed that the mountain where the mining titles are located also contain highly fractured rocks and, therefore, are more susceptible to landslides.
“Energy transition should not under any circumstances put at risk the water supply of such an important region,” Lopez said. “If we affect the area where the water originates, and you also take into account the production of heavy metal residues, we are putting at risk communities whose survival depends on the rivers.”
Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez (right) and President Gustavo Petro (left, on mic) at a June 7 demonstration in favor of government reforms / credit: Antonio Cascio
Does Clean Energy Protect the Environment and Indigenous Territories?
In April, Petro opened his speech in front of the Organization of American States (OAS) by talking about Latin America’s strategic importance in producing critical minerals for the “clean energy” transition. According to the International Energy Agency, the area from Mexico in the north to Chile in the south accounts for 40 percent of global copper production and 35 percent of the world’s lithium. Yet, the reserves remain underdeveloped, which for some means a great potential exists to increase production––not only of these two materials––but also of others essential to the transition away from fossil fuels. Those can include nickel and rare earth elements, among others.
Despite a growing consensus on the importance of reducing carbon emissions, questions have arisen over who should bear the environmental and social costs of extracting resources essential to this transition. Indigenous and peasant communities in Colombia worry copper mining will affect their livelihoods and even force them to abandon their territories.
“I feel so much pain to see that a company like Libero Copper and Gold is coming to destroy the most precious thing we have, water,” said Rufina Valencia, an elderly peasant woman who arrived in the village––where Libero Copper and Gold operates––when she was a child. It was this land that helped her and her husband, who worked in the water company, raise their kids, she said. “[Water] is the heart of our community, our Putumayo region, and the world. Because Putumayo is the lung of the world.”
Aerial view of the Putumayo department, called the door of the Amazon / credit: Antonio Cascio
Petro’s victory during last year’s presidential elections was due to the overwhelming support of Indigenous and peasant communities, who saw Petro and Vice President Francia Márquez as allies in their struggle to defend land rights and protect their territories. This support, however, could come under scrutiny if mining interferes with their way of life.
“In different parts of the country, it has been proven how mining results in a loss of sovereignty over the lands of communities and loss over food sovereignty, as people abandoned agricultural practices to work in the mines,” explained Carlos Duarte, Coordinator of Rural Development and Land-Use Planning at Javeriana University in the capital of Bogotá, in an interview with Toward Freedom.
In this sense, Petro’s government could find itself in a tough spot as his plans to increase Colombia’s share in critical materials for a transition away from fossil fuels and toward a more independent Colombia could eclipse the interests of Indigenous and peasant communities.
Taita Pablo Crispín Chindoy held a spiritual ceremony at the end of a meeting in March in Mocoa with Colombian Minister of Mines and Energy Irene Vélez Torres. Indigenous communities, and social and activist groups, from the Putumayo department organized this meeting to provide the minister with their case for requesting the end of the Libero Copper and Gold project in the Mocoa area / credit: Antonio Cascio
Controversy Within the Government
So far, neither Petro nor Márquez have released a public statement about the copper and molybdenum mining project in Mocoa.
Although Márquez does not have political functions related to the mining sector, she is expected to be vocal on mining issues, explains Duarte. “Márquez has stated during her campaign––and as Vice President––her conviction that mining, as it is currently implemented, is not feasible,” he said. Toward Freedom contacted Márquez’s office, requesting a statement on this matter, but did not receive a response. “She has been part of this struggle her whole life and will probably not disassociate from this matter,” Duarte added.
However, the neoliberal extractivist policies implemented by governments of the first left-wing wave that engaged a socio-ecological discourse ––as was the case of Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa ––show how these contradictory approaches have coexisted in the region.
According to Duarte, the Petro-Márquez government’s efforts to conserve the environment are obvious with the signing of the Escazú Agreement that aims to protect the environment and the lives of environmental activists. Although the agreement was signed in 2018, it was only until late last year that Colombia ratified it. The question remains of how the pair will move on the mining question. “Will they favor environmental protection or will they take an extractivist approach to satisfy the global demand for these resources?” Duarte asked.
Close to the Libero Copper and Gold mining project, three important rivers pass through the area, the Mocoa (seen here), the Caquetá and the Putumayo rivers. All are tributaries of the Amazon River, so contamination of their waters would affect the entire Amazon region / credit: Antonio Cascio
For now, the Colombian government is revising the existing mining code—which many hope will toughen regulations and protect the environment. The Petro-Márquez administration has approved the National Development Plan 2022-26, in which the protection of water is one of the three central elements of territorial planning and its development strategy. A fact that Lopez also associates with the government’s willingness to protect the environment.
“The energy transition has an enormous demand for strategic minerals. At the global level, that means extraction frontiers are under pressure,” said Minister of Mines and Energy Irene Vélez when visiting Indigenous and local communities in March in Mocoa. “But this government is not going to generate a copper rush that will leave social and environmental destruction.”
On various occasions, the National Mining Agency (or ANM in Spanish) has stated that the company cannot conduct any exploration or exploitation activities due to the 020 Regional Accord prohibiting medium and large-scale mining in Mocoa. However, the company has violated this accord by carrying out exploration activities. Such violations are verifiable on the company’s website, where they report on their activities. On this matter, the ANM is conducting an investigation but so far has not presented its findings.
In response to Toward Freedom‘s inquiry regarding the investigation, the agency said the process is still underway. However, this exceeds the time limit set forth in Article 288 of the Mining Code.
For now, Libero Copper and Gold continues operating in the territory and the people refuse to relent.
“I will not sell my land because I don’t want future generations to say they were left in a desert, impossible to survive because of my decision,” said Valencia, who has lived in Putumayo since childhood. “But if that project continues, we worry we will be forced to sell when the water is contaminated.”
The video above was first published by Mongabay.
Natalia Torres Garzón graduated with an M.Sc. in Globalization and Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, United Kingdom. She is a freelance journalist who focuses on social and political issues in Latin America, especially in connection to Indigenous communities, women, and the environment. Her work has been published in Earth Island, New Internationalist, Toward Freedom, the section of Planeta Futuro-El País, El Salto, Esglobal and others.
Antonio Cascio is an Italian photojournalist focused on social movements, environmental justice and discriminated groups. He has been working as a freelancer from Europe and Latin America. He has also collaborated with news agencies like Reuters, Sopa Images and Abacapress, and his pictures have been published in the New York Times, CNN, BBC, the Guardian, DW, Mongabay, El País, Revista 5W, Liberation, Infobae, Folha de S.Paulo, Amnesty International and others.
Top, left to right: Mumia Abu Jamal, Julian Assange and Alex Saab. Bottom, left to right: Leonard Peltier, Rev. Joy Powell and Veronza Bowers / photo illustration: Multipolarista
Editor’s Note: This article originally appeared in Multipolarista.
The United States constantly accuses its adversaries of holding political prisoners, while insisting it has none of its own. But for its entire history, the U.S. government has used incarceration of its political opponents as a tool to crush dissent and advance the interests of economic elites.
Well-known cases are those entrapped or framed in U.S. national security state sting operations, or imprisoned with extreme sentences for a minor offense because of their political activism, such as Black revolutionary George Jackson.
Each period of struggle by the working class and oppressed peoples against ruling-class control results in some activists locked up for their revolutionary work. “Political prisoner” has often meant those revolutionaries jailed for fighting their national oppression, as is the case with a great number of Black Panthers.
In contrast, a century ago, most political prisoners in the United States were Marxists, labor organizers, and anti-war activists, such as Joe Hill, Eugene Debs, and Big Bill Haywood.
Today, the U.S. national security state considers its most dangerous enemies those who expose its crimes at home and abroad.
There are also many thousands of incarcerated people who never received a fair trial, or were innocent of the crimes they have been jailed for. A high percentage of them are non-white, peoples subject to second-class citizenship in the United States. A number are executed, such as Troy Davis, or spend their whole lives in prison.
While the United States represents just over 4 percent of the world’s population, it holds approximately 20 percent of its prisoners. Black people are imprisoned at five times the rate of whites.
The following list of political prisoners currently detained by the U.S. government categorizes them into seven groups:
national security state employees and reporters locked up for publicizing blatant government criminality
representatives of foreign governments that Washington seeks to overthrow who were imprisoned for “violating” illegal unilateral U.S. sanctions
Black, Indigenous, and Latinx revolutionaries fighting for the rights of their peoples
Arabs and Muslims targeted after 9/11
prisoners detained in the Guantánamo torture center without charges
women locked up for defending themselves against violent attacks
environmental activists
1. Journalists and National Security State Employees Exposing Illegal U.S. Surveillance Operations and War Crimes
A number of whistleblowers in the United States have previously been imprisoned or are wanted. These have included:
Julian Assange is a renowned journalist and editor of WikiLeaks who was arrested in 2019 in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he had political asylum since 2012. In April 2022, a British judge ordered Assange extradited to the United States to face up to 175 years in prison for publishing truthful information about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States has indicted Assange under the Espionage Act, even though he published the same information as did the New York Times and Washington Post.
Researcher Mark Weisbrot explained in 2017, “Julian Assange is a political prisoner. … His crime, and that of WikiLeaks, has been the practice of journalism, and particularly in defense of human rights and civil liberties. … Assange and WikiLeaks’ real offense was to expose the crimes of the most powerful people in the world.”
Daniel Hale has been imprisoned since 2019. He was sentenced to 45 months for releasing documents showing U.S. military drone strikes in Afghanistan largely killed innocent people. Hale participated in the drone program while in the Air Force and NSA from 2009 to 2013, and later became an outspoken critic and a defender of whistle blowers.
Hale is believed to have been the source material for The Drone Papers. The documentary National Bird documents whistleblowers in the U.S. drone assassination program. For his truth-telling, Hale received the Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence and the Blueprint for Free Speech International Whistleblowing Prize. Chris Hedges has written about his case.
Joshua Schulte, a former hacker employed by the CIA, was blamed for releasing two billion pages of secret CIA data, known as Vault 7, to WikiLeaks. Vault 7 programs were CIA techniques used to compromise Wifi networks, hack into Skype, defeat anti-virus software, hack Apple and Android smartphones in overseas spying operations, turn internet-connected televisions into listening devices, and commandeer the guidance systems in cars.
Schulte has been imprisoned since 2018 and faces up to 80 years, in brutal conditions similar to those endured by Assange today.
Ana Belén Montes was a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) analyst who alerted Cuba of U.S. plans of aggression. She was arrested in 2001, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit espionage, and was held in solitary confinement in Fort Worth, Texas for most of her 21 years behind bars.
Montes told the judge, “I consider that the policy of our government towards Cuba is cruel and unjust, deeply unfriendly; I considered myself morally obligated to help the Island defend itself from our efforts to impose our values and our political system on it. We have displayed intolerance and contempt for Cuba for four decades. We have never respected Cuba’s right to define its own destiny, its own ideals of equality and justice. I do not understand how we continue to try to dictate. … how Cuba should select its leaders, who its leaders should not be and what laws are the most appropriate for that nation. Why don’t we let them decide how they want to conduct their internal affairs.”
2. Foreigners Imprisoned for ‘Violating’ Illegal U.S. Sanctions on Their Countries
Mun Chol Myong is a North Korean was extradited and imprisoned in the United States on March 20, 2021. Mun was arrested in Malaysia in May 2019 after a Washington, DC judge issued a warrant for his arrest. His supposed “crime” of conspiracy and money laundering in fact consisted of supplying needed goods to the DPRK by circumventing U.S. sanctions on the country.
A top Justice Department official claimed foreigners who have never been in the United States can be extradited to it for violating domestic laws. The United States has enforced a blockade against North Korea since 1950, the start of the U.S. war on Korea, designed to cripple its economic and social development.
Alex Saab, a Venezuelan diplomat, was jailed on June 12, 2020 in Cabo Verde on orders of the United States. He was then seized by U.S. agents and brought to a Miami prison on October 16, 2021.
As a diplomat, Saab has immunity from detention based on the UN Vienna Convention of 1961. The UN Human Rights Commission and other international human rights defenders have denounced his extradition. The National Lawyers Guild calls for Saab’s immediate release.
Simón Trinidad (Ricardo Palmera) was a long-time leader in mass movements for social change in Colombia, and is a top negotiator for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). In 2003, he was sent to Ecuador to make contact with UN official James Lemoyne, as part of efforts to revive peace talks with the Colombian government, and begin communication on the exchange of prisoners of war.
He was captured in Ecuador in 2004 and then extradited to the U.S. on charges of narco-trafficking and kidnapping, and subjected to four separate trials, due to repeated mistrials. Ultimately, he was sentenced to 60 years at the Florence “Supermax” prison in Colorado.
Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer and deputy chair of the board of Chinese tech giant Huawei, was imprisoned in Canada in 2018 on a U.S. extradition request, after Washington accused her company of misleading British bank HSBC over its business dealings in Iran, thereby violating its illegal unilateral sanctions. Meng was released in September 2021.
3. Fighters for Their People’s National Oppression Against Second-Class Citizenship
Many Black political prisoners in the United States were targets of the police state’s Counter Intelligence Program (COINTELPRO) in the 1960s and ’70s, when the FBI sought to destroy the movement for Black freedom.
As journalist Glen Ford explained, “If you attempt to lead Black people on an independent political path, the U.S. state will seek to neutralize you, imprison you, or kill you. If you exercise your right to defend yourself, and your people, from the oppressive arm of the state, they make you into an outlaw, and hunt you down.”
The FBI said it goals in COINTELPRO were to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize,” adding that “no opportunity must be missed to exploit through counterintelligence techniques … for maximum effectiveness … and a final goal should be to prevent the long range growth of militant black organizations, especially among youth.”
This police state operation against Black liberation resulted in at least 38 Black Panther Party members being killed, including Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, with hundreds more imprisoned on frame-up charges for their armed self-defense actions, several for more than 45 years.
Mumia Abu-Jamal is the most prominent former Black Panther political prisoner. In 1981, COINTELPRO style, he was sentenced to death for the murder of a Philadelphia cop. Judge Albert Sabo, who ruled in his case and in his appeals, was heard by a court reporter to state “I’m going to help them fry the ni**er.” Black jurors were excluded. Witnesses were bribed and threatened to lie on the stand. Documents were hidden in the state prosecutor’s office.
Leonard Peltier was an activist in the American Indian Movement (AIM) whose goal was to organize Indigenous communities to stand up for their rights. Sentenced to life as a result of a COINTELPRO operation, he has been imprisoned for 46 years for killing two FBI agents. Peltier participated in the AIM encampments on the Pine Ridge Reservation, where a 1975 shootout instigated by the FBI occurred.
Some 64 Native Americans, most with ties to AIM, were murdered. Their deaths went uninvestigated by the FBI. Evidence exonerating Peltier in the FBI case was withheld by the FBI. In his appeals, the government admitted it had no evidence he killed the two FBI agents, suppressed evidence proving this, and fabricated other “evidence.”
The other AIM members tried for the killings were exonerated in trial by reason of self-defense. One prosecutor admitted, “Your honor, we do not know who killed those agents. Further, we don’t know what participation, if any, Mr. Peltier had in it.”
Amnesty International, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, the American Association of Jurists, and 54 Congresspeople, among many others, have called for his freedom. The film “Incident at Ogala,” produced by Robert Redford, and the best-selling book “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement” made the case widely known. More information can be found at the websites whoisleonardpeltier.info and Peltier’s Prison Writings.
Mutulu Shakur, of the Republic of New Afrika movement, participated in presentations to the UN on discrimination experienced by Black communities, and by 1970 a target of the FBI’s COINTELPRO infiltration. He helped free Assata Shakur from prison in 1979, and she now has a bounty on her head.
In 1988 he was convicted of conspiracy related to a 1981 robbery where a guard and two police officers were killed, and sentenced to 60 years. At no time did the evidence show that Mutulu Shakur killed anyone.
He was also convicted for aiding in the prison escape of Assata Shakur, who has asylum in Cuba.
At two trials the evidence indicated others were responsible for the deaths (one became a government witness in return for a sentencing deal). The remaining defendants were acquitted for the murder allegations. More information can be found at mutulushakur.com and the Jericho Movement.
Jamil Abdullah al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) was chairman of Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a Black Panther leader. FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover himself named H. Rap Brown – along with Stokely Carmichael, Elijah Muhammad, and Maxwell Stanford – as targets of COINTELPRO.
In a October 1971 standoff with police, he was shot and seized, and spent five years in Attica prison. From 1992 to 1997, the FBI closely surveilled Al-Amin, generating pages of 44,000 documents. In 2000, two sheriffs came to Al-Amin’s store with a warrant for failure to appear in court for a case later thrown out. Both were shot and one killed. Al-Amin was sentenced to life without parole, even though Otis Jackson confessed to the shootings. More information is available at whathappened2rap.com.
Veronza Bowers was an organizer in the Black Panther Party in the late 1960s. He has been imprisoned for 49 years for the murder of a U.S. park ranger, on the word of two government informers. There were no eye witnesses and no other independent evidence. See more at veronza.org and prisonersolidarity.com.
Ed Poindexter and Mondo we Langa (who died in prison in 2016) were leaders of the Black Panthers in Omaha, Nebraska in the 1960s, and targets of COINTELPRO. Both men were given life sentences on charges of killing a policeman. They were convicted on the testimony of a teenager who was beaten by the police and threatened with the electric chair if he did not incriminate Poindexter and Mondo.
Amnesty International has identified them as “prisoners of conscience.” Poindexter has been imprisoned for 52 years. The book “FRAMED: J. Edgar Hoover, Cointelpro and the Omaha Two story” and the documentary “Ed Poindexter & Mondo We Langa” offer more information.
Kamau Sadiki (Freddie Hilton), was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army, and close to Assata Shakur. He has been imprisoned since 2002, for a 1971 murder of a police officer. Back in 1971, two witnesses failed to identify Kamau from a line-up, and there was no physical evidence that implicated Sadiki, so the case was closed.
In 2002 Kamau was re-arrested and sentenced to life imprisonment for the killing – only after he refused to work with the government to induce Assata Shakur to leave Cuba for another country, where they could seize her. See more at freekamau.com.
Joy Powell organized protests against police brutality and corruption, demanding accountability for its victims, which led her to be targeted by the Rochester Police Department. In 2006, Powell was convicted by an all-white jury and sentenced to 16 years for burglary and assault. No evidence or eyewitnesses linked her to the crime.
Alvaro Luna Hernandez (Xinachtli) is a Texas activist for Chicano rights and against police brutality. He was continually targeted by the police, who in 1996 attempted to arrest him on a spurious robbery charge that was later dismissed. The police used violence to arrest him, and Hernandez was sentenced to 50 years in prison on trumped up charges of threatening a sheriff while resisting arrest. More information can be found at freealvaro.net and prisonersolidarity.com.
more than half of all alleged terrorism cases involved the use of paid informants who were usually responsible for concocting the plots in collusion with the FBI. Sensationalistic media coverage of the most high-profile cases almost never made mention of the fact that these terrorist conspiracies were the work of FBI informants.
…
the FBI has built a network of more than 15,000 registered informants whose primary purpose is to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the bureau can then claim it is winning the War on Terror … the FBI engaged in a witch hunt, convicting hundreds of Muslims on pretext terrorism charges, even though the government knew that the defendants were not in communication with international terrorists, had not injured a single person or piece of property, and had no means to carry out a terrorist attack even if they wanted to.
For the government to tell the truth about the convictions would have undercut their own prosecutions, and exposed hundreds of Muslim convictions for the sham they were. No matter how innocent the government knew the defendants to be, it apparently decided that they had to publicly treat the defendants as the worst of the worst, or lose the fear factor which they had used so effectively to enact harsher laws.
Holy Land 5: Shukri Abu-Baker and Ghassan Elashi of the Holy Land Foundation were each sentenced in 2008 to 65 years in prison. Three others were sentenced to 13-20 years: Mufid Abdulqader, Mohammad El-Mezain (released and deported to Turkey in 2022) and Abdulrahman Odeh (released in 2020). All were imprisoned for giving more than $12 million to charitable groups in Palestine which funded hospitals and schools and fed the poor and orphans.
The U.S. government said these groups were controlled by Hamas, which it lists as a terrorist organization, even though it is the elected government of Gaza. Some of these charitable groups still received U.S. funds through USAID as late as 2006.
Testimony was given in the case by an Israeli government agent whose identity and evidence was kept secret from the defense. This marked the first time in U.S. legal history that testimony has been allowed from an expert witness with no identity, therefore making them immune from perjury. The book “Injustice: The Story of the Holy Land Foundation Five” details the case.
Aafia Siddiqui is a U.S.-educated Pakistani neuroscientist who came to the United States in 1990, then returned to Pakistan with her family in 2002. In 2003, she was kidnapped by U.S. and Pakistani agents and held in Bagram Air Base through 2008. She was convicted of attempted murder of her U.S. interrogators in Afghanistan in 2008—though she was the person shot—and sentenced to 86 years in prison in Fort Worth, Texas. The weapon she allegedly fired in the interrogation room did not have her fingerprints, nor was there evidence the gun was fired.
Four British parliamentarians wrote to President Barack Obama that “there was an utter lack of concrete evidence tying Dr Siddiqui to the weapon she allegedly fired at a U.S. officer,” and that she should be freed immediately. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark described Aafia’s plight as the “worst case of individual injustice I have ever witnessed.” More information is available at aafia.org and aafiamovement.com.
5. Arab/Muslim Prisoners Tortured and Locked Up Without Trial at Guantanamo
Since 2002, a total of 779 Muslim men and boys as young as 10 have been seized and held at Guantánamo, a military base in Cuban territory that is illegally occupied by the United States.
Washington claimed the prisoners are outside U.S. and international law, and thus do not have the rights of POWs. Nearly all of the prisoners were held without charge or trial. Many were tortured to produce a compliant “learned helplessness” – the goal of former U.S. slave-breaking.
Some detainees were even tortured to death. In 2003, 23 prisoners attempted suicide in a mass protest against their abuse.
The torture was directed by two psychologists, James E Mitchell and Bruce Jessen.
By any definition of political prisoner, most political prisoners in Cuba are at the U.S. military-torture center at Guantanamo.
Today there are still 36 prisoners, only 11 of whom have been charged with war crimes, while just two have been convicted – and by “military commissions,” which Amnesty International declared do not meet fair trial standards.
Another 20 have been approved for release but remain locked up. Five detainees are “forever prisoners,” held without charge or trial, but not to be released. The websites closeguantanamo.org and witnessagainsttorture.com and films The Report and The Mauritanian provide more information.
6. Women Fighting Patriarchal Sexist Violence
Nearly three in 10 women in the United States have endured male physical violence or stalking by a partner. Nearly one in five women are raped in their lifetime. Almost four women are killed a day by a male partner.
Half of all women murdered are killed by men they know intimately, yet hundreds of women are in prison for killing their abuser in self-defense.
The U.S. legal system treats these as individual cases, not for what it is: the systematic patriarchal violence against women as an oppressed group.
Marissa Alexander, a Black women from Florida, was sentenced to 20 years in 2013 for firing a warning shot inside her home to ward off her brutal husband, against whom she had an order of protection. Her affirmation that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law applied to her because she was defending herself was rejected. The same year, George Zimmerman was found not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin based on that same law. National protests finally freed her in 2017.
Fran Thompson was an environmental activist in Nebraska. She has been in jail for 30 years for murder, sentenced to life without parole. She had defended herself, killing a man who was threatening to sexually assault her after he broke into her home. She was also targeted because of her environmental work, and was not allowed to plea self-defense.
Thompson had taken on the prosecutor and local government during her activism, having organized against two big projects, an egg factory and a nuclear waste facility, which would have brought the county big profits.
Maddesyn George has been imprisoned since July 2020. She was given a 6.5-year sentence for defending herself from sexual assault by a white man. She is a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes.
A number of environmental activists, animal rights supporters, and water protectors have challenged corporate abuses and have been jailed.
During the original so-called Green Scare, in the 1990s to early 2000s, the U.S. government sought to squash animal rights and environmental activism, acting in the interest of corporations that profit from damaging the earth.
A more recent series of jailings have specifically targeted people protesting against pipeline construction.
The following are political prisoners:
Joseph Mahmoud Dibee, a member of Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front was arrested in 2018 for his participation in setting fire to a slaughterhouse. Between 1995 and 2001, a group of Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front supporters caused more than $45 million in damages in a series of arsons. Dibee is imprisoned awaiting sentencing.
Marius Mason (formerly Marie Mason), a member of the Earth Liberation Front, was arrested in 2008 for an attack on a lab building at Michigan State University that was creating genetically modified organisms, with funding from mega-corporation Monsanto, the producer of Agent Orange.
Mason was also sentenced for damage to commercial logging equipment. No one was harmed by these actions. Mason’s 22 year-sentence is the longest yet for any of the Green Scare cases of those committing crimes against property of corporations.
Jessica Reznicek, of the Catholic Workers Movement, took action in 2016 to stop the environmentally destructive Dakota Access Pipeline by dismantling construction equipment and pipeline valves and setting fire to construction machinery. She would have been handed three years, but was sentenced to eight, with the added sentence for terrorism, even though no person was physically harmed.
Reznicek’s actions against private property were “calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government,” meaning a person who takes direct action against an energy company can be treated as an enemy of the state. Reznicek explained, “What we did do was fight a private corporation that has run rampant across our country seizing land and polluting our nation’s water supply.”
The United States Government Has Political Prisoners
This list belies the myth that the United States has no political prisoners.
Political prisoners have no shared ideology. Standing for justice does not necessarily mean that one defends their political views; it means that one demands their freedom because they have been unjustly incarcerated.
Many hundreds of thousands of people have been unjustly incarcerated in the United States, but in these cases, it is clear that they were detained because of their political beliefs and activism, and that by definition makes them political prisoners.
