Fortuna (and Fish) in Oaxaca
I recently had the chance to visit beautiful Oaxaca City and a few towns in the surrounding area.
One sunny
Friday I teamed up with super-journalist Shannon Young, and we headed out to the market at Ocotlan, and from there to San José del Progreso, to look into a conflict involving Vancouver based Fortuna Silver. When we went down to check out the local water supply, some folks rowed in with their catch, and offered to give us some fish for the road!
Anyhow, this story is complex, so in addition to the piece I did for the Vancouver Media Co-op (which is posted below, and also ran in this month’s Dominion), I wrote up a reporter’s notebook with some additional background info, and there’s still more to tell.
Tensions Flare over Vancouver-owned Mine in Oaxaca
Vancouver Media Co-op, February 13, 2012.
It’s been almost three years since hundreds of Zapotec community members took direct action to temporarily shut down Vancouver-based Fortuna Silver’s gold and silver mine just south of Oaxaca City, Mexico.
The blockade ended with a massive police raid, during which demonstrators were beaten and 23 people were taken by police and jailed, some for up to three months. Since then, the neighbouring community of San José del Progreso has been deeply divided, and residents have faced a series of difficult and sometimes deadly confrontations.
Three people have been killed since then, most recently Bernardo Méndez Vásquez, who was shot seven times on January 18, 2012, by a municipal police officer. Locals say municipal authorities ordered the police to attack residents, who were refusing to allow a new water system to be installed on their land because they felt it would be used to supply the mine with water.
“Yes there’s problems in the municipality,” admits Bernardo Vásquez Sánchez, who lives in San José and works with the Coordinating Committee of the United Villages of the Ocotlan Valley. “But it’s not unconnected, because they started in 2008 and they’re because of the mine, if the company leaves, the municipal problems will be solved,” he said in an interview with the Vancouver Media Co-op. (more…)
Toxic Mining in Baja California?
I recently had the chance to write a feature for Watershed Sentinel about a couple of Canadian mining companies
and their plans to mine the incredibly beautiful lands of Baja California Sur.
You can download the piece at this link!
Militarized Mining in Mexico
Here’s a piece I did recently for The Dominion.
MADERA, MEXICO—On an August afternoon in 2008, Dante Valdez Jiminez was giving a teacher training 
class in an elementary school in Madera, a small town in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. But before he got through his lecture, he was interrupted by a group of 30 men, some of them armed.
In the minutes that followed, Valdez was savagely beaten in front of his students. While they beat him, his attackers yelled that he should keep his nose out of other people’s business. Valdez was lucky to escape with his life.
Five days later, Amnesty International put out an alert expressing concern for the safety of Valdez, as well as members of a nearby community. The attack was political: Valdez is known for his work against Minefinders, a Vancouver-based company that operates an open-pit gold mine near Madera. Amnesty indicated that among the attackers were employees of the mining company.
“There isn’t a single authority in any of the three levels of government that is looking out for the people who are displaced, for people who have been mistreated or beaten,” said Valdez, his voice quiet and low. He pointed out that there was a classroom full of witnesses to the incident, but there was never an investigation.
The attack on Valdez wasn’t an isolated event, but a brazen reminder of the repression meted out to those who organized against Minefinders, which began operating in Mexico in 1994 on the heels of the North American Free Trade Agreement. The company started construction on a low-grade, cyanide-leaching gold and silver mine near Madera in 2007. (more…)
Legal Battles in Mexico
Here’s a piece I did recently looking at U.S. backed changes to the legal system in Mexico for Upside Down World.
CHIHUAHUA, MEXICO–It’s not without reason that media coverage of the drug war is dominated by blood and horror: by some estimates, as many as 80,000 Mexicans have been killed since the war began in earnest five years ago. American critics of the atrocities taking place under the banner of the “war on drugs” often aim their sights at the Merida Initiative, a U.S.-Mexico plan which encouraged the militarization of the transportation and distribution of illicit drugs to, from, and within Mexico.
Originally conceived as a three year plan slated to end in 2010, the Merida Initiative has since expanded to mean much more than the deployment of U.S. helicopters, drug sniffing dogs and inspection equipment in Mexico.
In October, U.S. anti-drug czar and former ambassador to Colombia William Brownfield testified about what he called “Merida Part II,” before the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere. Brownfield highlighted strengthening Mexican institutions and the “rule of law” as well as promoting civil society participation in anti-crime initiatives as key areas of U.S. Mexico cooperation. Together, these activities have also been denominated “democracy promotion,” though that exact language is not officially used to describe Merida II.
Legal reform is one of the focal points of the second phase of the Merida Initiative, which takes the form of “implementation of comprehensive justice sector reforms through the training of justice sector personnel including police, prosecutors, and defenders, correction systems development, judicial exchanges, and partnerships between Mexican and U.S. law schools,” according to the State Department. (more…)
Occupy “Murder City”
Here’s a piece I did recently for the wonderful Upside Down World. I changed the title here. I’m reading Bowden right now, what can I say.
Mexico: Police Beatings, Jail Time and Threats Won’t Deter Indignadxs de Juarez Activists
Published Friday, 18 November 2011
CIUDAD JUAREZ – On October 15th, people all over the world responded to a call from Occupy Wall Street to join and become part of the movement. Folks from all walks of life who identify as part of the now famous 99 per cent responded to the call, setting up tent villages and holding actions in public (and private) spaces around the globe.
In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a group of activists from various organizations, collectives and political persuasions got together and decided that they too would organize in response to the call, under the name Indignadxs de Juarez. They held two events to coincide with the call on October 15th, but were unable to set up a permanent, occupy-style camp.
“Here in Juarez, demonstrating is dangerous, the conditions don’t exist [to occupy],” said Gero Fong, a local activist and Indignado. “One of our intentions was to set up a permanent camp, but given our numbers it wasn’t possible.”
Instead of camping out, Juarez’s Indignadxs called for a series of actions. On November 1st, they gathered again for a demonstration that was to include street theater and the symbolic wheat pasting of 9,000 paper crosses around the city, in memory of the over 9,000 people murdered here since 2008.
The police response to the November 1st demonstration quickly transformed into a national scandal. Police beat and arrested 29 people, among them activists, their supporters, and journalists.
“They threw me on the ground and between 10 and 15 officers started to beat me,” said Gerardo Solís, a secondary school teacher who was arrested in front of the police station while demanding the names of the detained. He was jailed overnight with the others. “They jailed me with the rest of the compañeros, and inside [the police] told me they were going to disappear me, that they have assassins working for them, that they’re going to disappear me, that they already knew that I’m a teacher and where I work, and that they would go after me,” he said. (more…)
Review: Bolivia’s Uncertain Revolution
A review I did recently for Detroit-based magazine Against the Current.
Los ritmos de Pachakuti:
Levantamiento y movilización en Bolivia (2000-2005)
Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar
Bajo Tierra Ediciones, D.F., México. 2009.
Dispersing Power:
Social Movements as Anti-State Forces
Raul Zibechi. Translated by Ramor Ryan
AK Press, Oakland, 2010, 163 pages, $15.95 paper.
From Rebellion to Reform in Bolivia:
Class Struggle, Indigenous Liberation, and the Politics of Evo Morales
Jeffery R. Webber
Haymarket Books, Chicago, 2011, 236 pages + notes and index. $19 paper.
BOLIVIA UNDER THE presidency of Evo Morales has become a favorite topic among progressives and social democrats, who have likened his ascendency to the nation’s highest post as nothing short of revolutionary. The buzz around Morales, a long time social movement figure and the first Indigenous president of the Andean nation has only lost a little luster since his election almost six years ago.
Many otherwise critical thinkers have chosen to ignore the complex realities on the ground, instead choosing to believe that indeed major societal gains and positive changes can come through taking state power.
A landlocked nation of just under 10 mil-lion people, Bolivia was barely on the radar for many North Americans before the now famous “Water War” rocked Cochabamba in 2000. In the years that have followed, Bolivia has gone through great waves of resistance, repression, rebellion, and reform. (more…)
Café sin Carbono?
Here’s a piece I did for the September/October edition of Watershed Sentinel. It took lots of work, I find writing about the carbon market extremely challenging. 
The afternoon scene at the Jaime Sabinas sports complex in Jaltenango, a town in southern Mexico, is about the farthest thing imaginable from a bustling Seattle coffee shop. I’ve come to this mountainous region, hours by gravel road off the tourist track, to get a first hand look at what life is like for the people who grow the coffee we’re told is fair trade. After a drive through Jaltenango, a medium-sized, coffee growing town with prominent coffee warehouses decorated with Starbucks logos, I arrived at the stadium to meet a group of people displaced from their homes and plantations in September.
Over 100 people have been living in these close, cramped quarters since December. Most of the community left their lands after heavy rains caused mudslides in September, and now they sleep side by side on mats on the floor in a concrete auditorium. They’ve lived through an epidemic of lice, an outbreak of skin disease, and a series of respiratory infections.
The parking lot is the makeshift central park in this temporary village, which resembles a refugee camp. White, plastic roofed tents with blankets for walls serve as school and the kitchen. “It’s a disaster,” said one woman, one of the few who agreed to talk on the condition of anonymity. “In that damn stadium we have to sleep all squished together.”
The people living in the sports stadium seemed afraid of speaking to foreign journalists, as if the entire future of this community, known as Nuevo Colombia, depended on the kindness of the state government. They were promised permanent houses in a model village style housing block known as the Sustainable Rural City of Jaltenango. This new village, one of five of its kind in Chiapas, was supposed to be ready in February, but by July, not a single house had been constructed.
Most mornings, the men return to their small plots of land to care for their coffee plants. They sell their beans to a variety of organizations, including Mexico’s largest coffee buyer and exporter, United Agroindustrialists of Mexico (AMSA). Day to day life is precarious. Before long, I was escorted off the gated premises of the sports complex by police and private security. My first taste of what life is like for coffee growers displaced by an extreme climate event was about as pleasant as a day old cuppa joe. And it was just the beginning. (more…)
A Canadian mining company prepares to dig up Mexico’s Eden
Here’s a piece that I wrote in the spring, which was published a few days ago by the excellent This Magazine.
Under a heavy afternoon sun, the desert landscape in central Mexico lays long into the horizon, interrupted only by railroad tracks, roadrunners racing beside cars, and every once in a while, a cluster of houses and shops. But towards what some consider the sacred heart of the desert, new features begin to emerge: new age hippies and fellow travellers compete for rides on the side of the road, and in the distance, a dramatic mountain range rises from the plane.
Stretching from Arizona to San Luis Potosí, the Chihuahuan desert wraps around two of Mexico’s largest mountain ranges, laying claim to over 450,000 square kilometers of territory. While at first glance the topography might appear dry and barren, it is in fact home to a fifth of the world’s species of cacti, as well as a host of birds and other creatures.
But there’s one plant in particular that’s an essential part of the region’s draw: peyote. A small, circular cactus, divided into sections that look like a light green cross section of a mandarin orange, it pushes its way out from under the hard dry earth, sometimes into the direct sun, other times under the sparing shade of gobernadora plants.
In the southern reaches of the Chihuahuan desert is an area known as Wirikuta, a sacred site for the Huichol people. Every year, hundreds of Huichol people, whose name for themselves in their own language is Wixáritari, leave their communities in Jalisco, Nayarit and other parts of Mexico and begin a pilgrimage to Wirikuta.
“For us it’s like a temple,” says Marciano de la Cruz Lopez of Wirikuta. He’s one of the few Huichols making a home in the small, mining-cum-tourist town of Real de Catorce. (more…)
Aboriginal groups in Canada challenge tar sands projects
Hey folks, 
It’s been a while since I’ve done any radio, so it was a challenge and a pleasure to produce this four minute feature for Free Speech Radio News about resistance to pipelines in Central BC.
Click here to listen to the piece.
More anon,
dawn
Book Review – To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War
Here’s a review I wrote recently for Upside Down World.
To Die in Mexico: Dispatches from Inside the Drug War, John Gibler, 
City Lights Books, 2011. 218 pages.
John Gibler’s new book To Die in Mexico opens with a warning: “You may want to look away.” It is true that the contents are not exactly pleasant, in fact, Gibler’s tales from Mexico will horrify, over and over again.
But To Die in Mexico brings to the table more than just nota roja, a term used to describe sensationalist coverage of violence that dominates Mexico’s newsstands.
Gibler avoids the standard fare and serves up an accessible, multi-faceted analysis of the drug war, complemented by compelling dispatches from journalists and activists based in places like Culiacán, the capital of Sinaloa state and home of Mexico’s most powerful cartel; Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua state’s most notorious city; and Reynosa, the biggest border city in Tamaulipas state, where journalism was declared “dead” last year.
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