You can download the piece at this link!

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. Madera, which means “wood” in Spanish, is situated high in the Sierra Madre mountain range and possesses the rugged air of a logging town. But the area is anything but tranquil: throughout the Sierra Madre, the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s most powerful drug cartel, is said to be battling with La Linea, the armed wing of the Juarez Cartel.

According to the official story, at stake are trafficking routes, as well as vast fields where marijuana and opium poppies are cultivated by peasant and Indigenous farmers.

The war in Mexico, often called a “war on drugs,” launched in late 2006, resulting in increased violence and militarization that has spread to municipalities and rural areas all over the country. The northern state of Chihuahua has been particularly hard hit. Since 2008, more than 9,000 people have been murdered in the city of Juarez alone, and massacres against unarmed civilians have taken place across the state.

But in some areas, like Madera, it appears the militarization that’s taken place on the pretext of the drug war has worked in favour of the extractive industries.

Before construction of the Minefinders mine could begin, the historic town of Dolores was relocated to make way for the project, affecting more than 60 families. Locals were not ardently anti-mining, but many felt that Ejido Huizopa, the body which represents communal landholders in the area, was not getting a fair shake.

By 2008, as construction gave way to gold production, tensions between the company and members of Ejido reached a breaking point. That May, after coming to a majority decision in an assembly, members of the Ejido erected a blockade at the mine access route, demanding meaningful negotiations and a better agreement with the company. People working for the mining company were prevented from passing, but soldiers were allowed through the barricades.

Minefinders soon found a way around the protesters, one which didn’t involve sitting at a negotiating table.

“At the blockade, there was always, permanently, soldiers travelling in the company trucks, dressed like civilians, [and] as many as eight company trucks watching the demonstrations, the blockade,” said Valdez. Not only were blockaders intimidated by the presence of soldiers, but the company continued to access the mine, passing through the blockade because they had soldiers in their trucks.

During and immediately following an attack by armed commandos that year on civilians in Creel, a neighbouring village, soldiers and police maintained a continuous presence at the blockade.

“There was an attack on the community of Creel, and 14 people were killed,” explained David de la Rosa, an environmentalist and peasant organizer based in Madera. “The authorities took three days to get to Creel, and the army was here accompanying a peaceful blockade, backing up a company, just two hours away from where this took place.”

The blockade lasted one year and five months, during which time residents say Minefinders co-opted members of Ejido Huizopa through financial incentives and intimidation.

“When the mining company saw that we had a majority of [communal land owners] supporting us, they began to manipulate in a certain way, using the same people from the Ejido to manipulate other companeros, to ensure that we didn’t have a majority in decision-making,” said Luis Pena Amaya, a member of Ejido Huizopa who helped organize the blockade.

As on the blockades, the militarization of the region factored into Minefinders’ ability to win support for their open-pit mine.

“The Federal Police had a presence and intimidated people on many occasions. In the decisive assembly, they took control and surrounded the inside of the salon where we held our assembly,” said Pena Amaya. The intrusion of police into communal decision-making is unconstitutional in Mexico. “When things turned against the other group, which was the group preferred by the mining company, [Federal Police] intervened to ensure that we didn’t exercise our rights.”

Eventually, the Ejido signed an agreement with Minefinders, but problems remain. Last year, a tear in the liner of a heap leach pad, which has yet to be fully repaired, caused leakage of contaminants near the mine site. Environmentalists and human rights organizations in the area confirmed that they fear travelling to the mine site, because the road to the mine is under the control of organized crime groups.

Dawn Paley is a journalist and co-founder of the Vancouver Media Co-op.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

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.A country-wide transition from written trials to U.S. style oral trials is one of the most significant elements of these reforms. Chihuahua was the first state in the republic to transition to the oral court system, providing a template for legal reforms under the Merida Initiative. Beginning in 2003 the U.S. started to provide funds for the transition to oral trials in Chihuahua. Oral trials officially began in Chihuahua City in 2007, and in Ciudad Juarez in 2008.

According to Oscar Castrejón Rivas, president of the College of Lawyers in Chihuahua City, the U.S. used the World Bank to leverage the transition to oral trials, on the pretext that U.S. citizens accused of crimes in Mexico were tortured or forced into making confessions. Castrejón admits that there’s truth to that accusation, but he says forced confessions continue up until today, even under the oral trials system. He thinks there’s another reason behind the U.S. backed transition to oral trials.

“Just as within globalized commerce [the U.S.] wants a world where everywhere there is a McDonalds, an Applebees, a Home Depot, a Walmart, a Sam’s [Club]; they also want a world where tribunals are the same everywhere as they are in the United States, so that whatever legal issues they have can be dealt with perfectly well by a legal firm from the United States, which can operate in the U.S., in Puerto Rico, in Argentina, in Chile, and so on,” said Castrejón’s.

Castrejón’s observations point to a theme that dates back to at least the 1960s in the context of U.S. legal assistance to Latin America.

“In the early years of the law and development movement, legal assistance was often perceived as an administrative mechanism for ‘nation building’ and as a forum for stable and predictable commercial transactions within an implicit liberal capitalist economy,” wrote James A. Gardener in his 1980 bookLegal Imperialism: American Lawyers and Foreign Aid in Latin America. “In this sense, American legal assistance initially promised to reinforce prevalent ideas of national development that stressed industrialization and economic growth.”

“With nothing more than a lawyer who speaks English and Spanish, [the U.S.] can sit in the courtroom and argue their case,” said Castrejón, who has spent the last four years working in the oral trials system. The new system provides increased discretion to judges to rule one way or the other, says Castrejón, who also pointed out that sentencing under this system often has more to do with the ability and charisma of lawyers than with the facts of the case.

For other social activists, changes to the legal system represented a welcome shift away from a judiciary widely regarded as corrupt.

“The new criminal justice system is a total turn away from what was the criminal justice system, introducing a series of effective guarantees for the accused and even more importantly for the victims,” said Irma Villanueva, a lawyer who works with the Center for Women’s Human Rights (CDHM) in Chihuahua City. Villanueva traces reforms to the justice system in Chihuahua to of the hundreds of international rulings against the state’s legal system, particularly relating to the levels of impunity for femicides and disappearances.

But though today Chihuahua has extremely progressive laws on the books, Villanueva says access to justice remains a serious problem, especially for women.

“Just recently, in March-April, the first oral trial for the crime of domestic violence was heard,” said Villanueva. “Of the hundreds of cases and of investigations that have been presented since 2007, this was the very first,” she said. “This gives you an idea of how important this type of crime is for the administrators of justice, no?” she said, noting that sexism and discriminatory practices remain common among legal practitioners.

In 2008, President Felipe Calderón led a federal constitutional reform that means all states in the country will shift to oral trials by 2016, a move USAID calls “the most important reform in the field of justice and public safety adopted by Mexico since 1917.” USAID began participating in judicial reforms in Mexico in 2003, and remains an important player in Mexico through Merida II.

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.The next evening, arrestees were released on bail amounting to approximately US$40. In the days following, there was increasing clarity on why the police repressed demonstrators so intensely.

“The population here feels helpless, and I think [the police] are exercising preventative repression,” said Fong. The collective, public attack on protestors must be understood in the context of the militarization of Juarez since early 2008, when 7,500 troops were deployed to the city, followed by thousands of federal police.

“I believe that Ciudad Juarez is being taken as an experimental city, this is the first place [in Mexico] that was militarized, this is where the assassinations began, where a series of bi-national policies have been experimented with, and now what they’re trying to do is apply repressive policies with the clear objective of introducing fear among those who protest and set the example that here there will be no protests,” said Fong, still sporting a black eye from the beating he received from police.

Long time Juarez activists say it is the first time in almost 20 years that so many comrades were beaten and jailed at once in a clear act of political policing.

“[The police] showed its force against people it shouldn’t have, against us, the people who want this city to be in peace,” said Elizabeth Flores, who has been active in movements in Juarez since the early 1990s. “They don’t do this against delinquents, against those who are committing crimes in these moments.” Flores pointed to the economic system, unemployment, militarization and impunity as the root causes of the violence that the Indignadxs de Juarez are standing against.

When asked why the Indignadxs de Juarez are in the streets, Doctor Arturo Vasquez Peralta responded without hesitation, his words sharp and his face tight. “Nine thousand dead in Ciudad Juarez. Lack of investigation of those 9,000 dead. Lack of will to clarify those 9,000 deaths,” he said. For Peralta, the repression of the November 1st action is the sum of policies that have been used in Juarez for years, designed to send a message that protests will not proceed, under the threat of violence.

Regardless, in their first meeting after they were released from prison, the Indignadxs de Juarez decided that they will demonstrate again on November 26th, crosses and wheat paste in hand. I asked Julian Contreras, a community activist, what it is like to organize in this kind of atmosphere.

“According to their logic, given the scale of the repression happening in this city, we should already be hiding under our beds trembling with fear, but that’s not what happens,” said Contreras.

“We’ve arrived to such a high level of violence, where people are cut into pieces and their bodies spread around the city, and we know that this is a state strategy: they can kill your family, your siblings, your in-laws, your friends, they can disappear you,” he said. “And you still go into the streets because you know there is no other option, because what is under threat isn’t you but the entire community.”

The fact that conditions are so difficult in Juarez has led to more unity among groups and movements, says Contreras, who points out that Zapatistas, anarchists, socialists, Stalinists, Trots, social democrats, NGOs, Human Rights organizations, and Christians have come together to protest. “That, on a national level, is inconceivable,” he said.

Regardless of this unity, Fong classifies the movement in Juarez as one of qualitative force rather than quantative force. “Numbers-wise, in our strongest moment we were 3,000 when we did a march because of a shooting of a student during a march for peace,” said Fong. “Our movement has since oscillated between 10 and 100 people, rising and falling, rising and falling.”

For Fong, Contreras, Flores, and others, there is no doubt that regardless of the fact that speaking out can be deadly, they will continue to stand up and resist militarization and the dominant economic paradigm.

“We haven’t managed to create a mass movement, but yes an important movement that denounces things that many people here are not ready to denounce because of fear,” said Fong.

*Indignadxs is a non-gendered way of referring to those participating in these movements. It was widely used to refer to those who participated in the protest encampments in Spain that preceded Occupy Wall Street.

. 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. Green Monopolists: Starbucks and Conservation International

Over the past 20 years, Starbucks Coffee has come to shape the way people around the world drink their coffee: tall or venti, extra hot or frappuchinoed, and most importantly, no-whip, which is to say, without guilt. Beyond the coffee, recyclable cups and  fair trade beans connect the Starbucks brand to a feel-good experience for consumers.

But far away from the familiar buzz of the grinder and the staccato of a barista cleaning the espresso machine, there’s growing concern about the goals of the world’s largest gourmet coffee company. Not only is Starbucks failing to live up to its current rhetoric, say other local growers and fair trade proponents, but the company’s plans for the future are cause for concern.

Dressed in a collared shirt, posed on a rock beside a stream that cuts through his family’s coffee farm, Efraín Orantes Abadía talks to a filmmaker working for Starbucks and Conservation International. He describes the measures his family takes to ensure that their coffee is grown in an ecological way, and in the final cut, gentle piano music plays in the background.

The next scene in the video, a promotional tool for Starbucks’s Shared Planet brand, is inside a Starbucks coffee shop. A barista is offering up organic, shade grown Mexican coffee, and as the camera pans along a bag of beans from Chiapas, a customer expresses their taste for coffee that protects birds. The video then takes viewers back to the Orantes’ harmonious plantation, which is known as Finca Arroyo Negro.

The reality on the ground is a little different. Small scale coffee growers are among the most precarious labourers in the region, as I’d already seen in Jaltenango. By the time I met Orantes two years after the promotional video was shot, the story shifted even more.

“Shared Planet, the program of CAFE Practices, after we worked on their documentary they promised lots of things to support us in our efforts to look after Triunfo [biosphere reserve], they promised us equipment and assistance, and we haven’t received anything,” he said.

Finca Arroyo Negro has since stopped selling their coffee to Starbucks, having realized there’s better money elsewhere. They’re not the only ones. At least four well established growers’ cooperatives in Mexico broke ranks with Starbucks and Conservation International  after the introduction of CAFE Practices in 2004. Many of these growers sought out smaller buyers with a strong commitment to the principles of fair trade.

CAFE Practices is a self-regulated “farmer equity” certification program designed by Starbucks and Conservation International. “Unlike Fair Trade, their standards do not include a guaranteed minimum price to the producer,” according to Marie-Christine Renard, a sociologist from the University of Chapingo in Mexico State.

Together with Conservation International, Starbucks has undermined the strength of smaller coffee cooperatives, writes Renard, who points out that AMSA plays an intermediary role in the CAFE Practices program.

“They want to monopolize the production and cultivation of coffee,” said Jordan Orantes Balbuena, Efraín’s father and the owner of Finca Arroyo Negro, referring to AMSA. “They monopolize production, and they pay producers the price they want.”

From “Farmer Equity” to Carbon Neutrality?

Conservation International is certainly no stranger to controversy. With annual revenues upwards of $77 million last year, you could say that CI is to environmentalism as Starbucks is to coffee: a green machine.

In their  2010 annual report, Conservation International calls the results of their partnership with Starbucks in Chiapas “one of the first and most notable corporate engagements to address climate change.”  But outside the feel good gloss of annual reports and promotional videos, the relationship between CI and Starbucks isn’t quite so transparent.

The air conditioning blasted cool relief as I stepped through the front entrance of the sprawling Camino Real hotel in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the capital of Chiapas. The occasion was the presentation of the coffee growing sector’s strategy with regards to climate change in Chiapas, an event hosted by the Government of Chiapas and Conservation International .

Under the bright lights of the chandeliers in the hotel ballroom, over 100 coffee farmers were broken into four groups, each sitting around a facilitator with a flipchart. I joined in the back of one of the groups, our facilitator was a representative from the UN. He was coaxing the men to participate, asking them to give some feedback; when that failed he tossed around a plastic ball, and whoever got stuck with it when he called out “time up” would be required to read from an 87 page document prepared before the meeting started.

This, I realized, was part of what Conservation International and the government of Chiapas would later call a consultation process with peasant farmers. Risk management, related to erosion and extreme weather events was the top priority for these coffee farmers, who tend to between 0.5 and three hectares of shade grown coffee plantations. Many of these events are connected to climate change, though CI presented climate change as an altogether separate phenomenon, for which it proposed a novel solution: a new climate law, and the invisible hand of the carbon market.

“The project on actions to mitigate climate change, which is forest carbon capture in coffee growing communities in the Sierra Madre, started three years ago, in 2008,” said Monica Morales, the technical coordinator of Conservation International. Morales and I spoke after the session had wrapped up for the day.

Although their logo didn’t appear on event materials, Morales told me Starbucks was the main financier of the meeting.

The final document from the meetings in Tuxtla recommended that Chiapas implement the Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation Law, which was passed by the state congress in December 2010.

One of specific outcomes of the new law is to encourage the adoption of the State of Chiapas Climate Change Action Plan (PACCCH), which Conservation International had a hand in developing. The PACCCH calls for baseline studies towards the implementation of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, (REDD), the United Nations’ plan to integrate forests into the carbon market.

Carbon trading schemes have invited intense criticism over the past years. In the case of small coffee farmers in Chiapas, entering the carbon market will involve selling carbon credits from trees on their shade grown plantations, as well as planting new trees. The buyers of carbon credits, be they  corporations or  governments, would thus offset their emissions. Groups like Conservation International will act as intermediaries between transnational corporations and the people selling the carbon credits. According to the emerging logic of the carbon market, this would neutralize the carbon output of those who buy the credits.

On the surface, it appears that everybody wins. Farmers will receive small annual payments for the trees that are already on their land, or new trees they’ve planted. The governments of Mexico and Chiapas will green their image, Conservation International will create a new revenue stream managing their credits, and Starbucks’  growers will  receive subsidies through third parties. The whole exercise will be branded as a response to climate change .

The reality may well prove to be otherwise. A pilot project for carbon neutral coffee carried out in 2008 failed to deliver on its stated goals when small scale coffee farmers didn’t show interest in planting trees on their properties. One of the key reasons farmers didn’t participate was because they received less than $10 a month in the first year for planting new trees.  But more importantly, the trees that provide shade on small plantations in Chiapas already absorb carbon. Integrating them into the carbon market changes little in terms of actually counteracting climate change. Instead, it creates a new market around them, and further obscures and complicates what real action against climate change requires.

The science of climate change and the impacts it causes is something that organizers and activists in Chiapas are just starting to understand, says Gustavo Castro Soto, an organizer with Otros Mundos in San Cristobal de las Casas. “When it comes to the market mechanisms, which are complicated… Those are left to specialists and environmentalists, even though we should all understand them,” he said. “And if you criticize them, [organizations like Conservation International] come after you saying you’re against development, that you’re against fighting climate change,” said Castro.

Carbon Laboratory

For the world’s largest coffee company, Chiapas, Mexico is a key laboratory to test the possibilities of hooking the farmers at the base of their supply chain into the carbon market.

Why would Starbucks want to promote a law specifically dealing with climate change, when there’s already other environmental laws? That’s precisely the question Efrain Orantes has been asking himself.

“I think that together, Starbucks, AMSA and CI are creating… a new standard, to say that it is carbon neutral coffee,” he said. Conservation International has already run one project in Chiapas modeling the possibility of café sin carbono, or coffee without carbon.  Starbucks refused to answer questions about this issue before this story went to press.

While executives in Seattle and Washington draw up plans to take advantage of the carbon market, it is small farmers in Chiapas who continue to bear the direct burden of climate change. “I don’t  think anyone is denying the climate crisis and climate change,” said Castro. “But [business, industry and large NGOs] are proposing solutions that won’t work, false solutions to climate change, and they’re making money off of  this crisis,” he said.

Erratic rains and unexpected droughts are just part of how the climate is changing. The strongest impacts are without a doubt the weather events that lead to disasters like the mudslides that displaced the community of Nuevo Colombia last year. The complicated logic of the carbon market might give pause to conscientious North Americans with the means to sip coffee at Starbucks. But it does little to decrease the vulnerability of farming families in Chiapas, who will continue to suffer the most dramatic consequences of the climate crisis.

***

Dawn Paley is a freelance journalist in Vancouver.

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.

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

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.

The Alliance for Global Justice is pleased to announce that Dawn Paley will be teaching a course, “Journalism from the Grassroots”, in the first session of our new online activist school.

The course will run five weeks from Sept. 22-Oct. 8, 2011. The deadline for registration is Sept. 16, 2011. The cost of the course is $250. If you need fundraising tips to raise the tuition, send an email to Jamie Way at info@AFGJ.org.

Check out the other great courses at http://AFGJ.org.

Course: Journalism from the Grassroots
Instructor: Dawn Paley
Duration: 5 weeks, online
Click here to register now!

Description:
Journalism has changed radically over the past decade, but it’s still worth learning the basics behind the craft. Today many more people are able to communicate online, but an abundance of information and questions about the quality of information continue to obscure important stories from getting the attention they deserve. In this course, activists will be taught the key precepts of journalism, specifically writing for the web, developing sources, doing background research and how to have their work be read by a wider audience. Readings will include exemplary pieces of journalism on militarization and social movements in Latin America and the U.S., as well as journalism, research and publication tip sheets.

Skills/understanding that activists will have for organizing and opposing militarism after taking this course:

Research and writing skills
Understanding of how to develop sources
Knowledge of the various options that exist for publishing and self-publishing online
About the Instructor: Meet Dawn Paley
Dawn Paley has been working as a freelance journalist for the last eight years, six of which she has focused on Latin America. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Upside Down World,
and NACLA report on the Americas. For the last 3 years she has worked with the Media Co-op, Canada’s most innovative grassroots news network, and helped found a local chapter of the Co-op in her home town of Vancouver, BC. She holds a Master’s in Journalism from the University of British Columbia and regularly give community journalism workshops for activists.