First off, The Dominion recently republished two pieces of mine, one on Canadian oil companies in Latin America, and another on a Supreme Court decision in Chile that shut down prep work for a mine owned by Goldcorp. I wrote a piece for Watershed Sentinel about tourism in Mesoamerica & struggles against hydro electric projects on the Usumacinta River. Round that out with a couple of blog posts, one about the “charter cities” proposal in Honduras and another critiquing NYT coverage of the increased military role in Honduras.

There’s a bunch more stuff that will be out soon, which I’m very excited about… In the meantime here’s my latest for Upside Down World on Otto Pérez Molina’s position on drugs… All the more relevant given what’s going on right now in Santa Cruz de Barrillas in Huehuetenango.

Guatemala: Decriminalization? Don’t Believe the Hype

Dawn Paley, April 30, 2012

FLORES, PETEN–Guatemalan President Otto Pérez Molina has made headlines around the world for his suggestion that the U.S. led “War on Drugs” has failed, and that other options should be explored. Media fanfare around his position at the Summit of the Americas in Colombia has re-cast the retired hard line general as a progressive, innovative president. But according to analysts who spoke to Upside Down World, the President’s decriminalization plan is a smokescreen for increased militarization, and the rearrangement of Guatemala’s drug trafficking elite.

“My perspective is that [Pérez Molina’s] proposal is a smokescreen, something designed to distract from the confluence of problems of Guatemalan society, and particularly those of the rural peasant farmers,” Maximo Ba Tiul, a Mayan Poqomchi analyst and professor explained to Upside Down World. “What is in dispute is territory, and especially the territory of Indigenous peoples, and so while he’s consolidating his process of control he comes up with this, knowing full well that he can’t fight his friends and colleagues, and that he has no capacity to pressure the United States.”When Pérez Molina flew from Guatemala City to Cartagena, he took the private jet of Multi Inversiones Company, one of the largest and most powerful business conglomerates in Guatemala. His speech at the Summit of the Americas was measured and diplomatic. He talked about poverty and disaster relief. Then he talked about how Guatemala is falling victim to a war that they didn’t “provoke or initiate” because of their geographic position between Colombia, the world’s largest producer of cocaine, and the United States, the largest market for it.

Pérez Molina’s speech didn’t mention legalization, though he hinted at it by mentioning that tobacco and alcohol provoke less violence than other harmful substances. “We have to dialogue about whether we should continue doing the same thing we’ve done for fifty years to fight drug consumption, production and trafficking, even though we haven’t succeeded in eradicating said market,” he said.

The international media ate it up.

“Is the war on drugs over?” read a headline in Canada’s Maclean’s magazine in the lead up to the Colombia meeting, the article going on to suggest that Central American countries could go ahead and “legalize” drugs under the nose of the United States. Other establishment publications took more studied approaches. Foreign Policy asked why the United States can’t figure out something the rest of the world already knows: that the war on drugs isn’t working. The Economist caught up with Pérez Molina for an interview about broadening the debate around legalization. The New York Review of Books ran a well written piece that delved a little more into Pérez Molina’s background.

It’s hard to imagine how a former intelligence chief who presided over one of the bloodiest regions in Guatemala during a period later described as genocide by the United Nations could so completely transform his image in a matter of months. But since Pérez Molina first mentioned legalization on February 11th, that’s just what’s happened on the international stage.

Inside Guatemala, however, Pérez Molina’s past isn’t so easy to ignore, even in the wake of his bold new proposal.

“Otto Pérez Molina arrives to the Presidency of the Republic with a curriculum stained by his past in counterinsurgency, his dark passage through military intelligence, and his tight links with the conservative business elite,” wrote Luis Solano, an economist and researcher, in November of 2011.

Pérez Molina described his own style of governance as one inspired by Colombia’s controversial ex-President Álvaro Uribe. He also promised to use Kaibiles, Guatemala’s elite special forces (whose defectors have been linked to the Zetas) in the war on drugs.

After his election, Pérez Molina tapped numerous retired military men from his party, called the Patriot Party [PP], to become ministers in his government. One of them, General Ulises Noé Anzueto Girón, the minister of defense, was accused of participating with eight others in torturing and killing Efraín Bámaca, a member of the since disappeared guerilla group Organization of the People in Arms (ORPA).

Beyond his connections with a powerful elite connected to the extractive industries and the energy sector, there are also important links between Pérez Molina’s government and a powerful sector of organized crime.

“Fernández Ligorría, a military man from [city of] Coban, was one of the most important figures in the PatriotParty, and was very close to the current president, Otto Pérez Molina,” a Guatemalan analyst told Upside Down World, asking to remain anonymous out of fear for his safety. Before his death in January of 2011, various media outlets described Ligorría as the head of the Mexican narco-paramilitary group Los Zetas in Guatemala. “One of his sons, José Fernández Chanel, is currently a sitting congressperson with the [Patriot Party].”

“It’s complicated, because a direct fight [against drug trafficking] on the part of the government would implicate confronting their own colleagues, ex-colleagues, and high ranking military officials,” the Guatemalan analyst told Upside Down World. “This could unleash wars of another kind, power disputes which could put at risk not only the stability of the government of Pérez Molina, but also the stability of the state itself.”

Military personnel from Coban make up an important part of Pérez Molina’s support base. Coban is in the department of Alta Verapaz, where former President Alvaro Colom declared a state of emergency in 2010, allegedly because of the presence of Zetas there. A state of emergency was later declared in Guatemala’s northern state of Peten, following the massacre of 27 (mostly Indigenous) farmhands in May of 2011, an act that was also blamed on the Zetas. Peten comprises one third of Guatemala’s territory, and contains important oil fields, plentiful water resources, and mega diverse tropical forests.

For all the talk of a new strategy in the drug war, on March 30, the Guatemalan defense minister announcedthe creation of a new, anti-narcotics military task force called “Tecun Uman” that will benefit from technical and financial assistance from the United States. Four days later, on April 3, Horst Walter Overdick Mejia, a drug trafficker affiliated with the Zetas who was active in Alta Verapaz and Peten, was captured in Guatemala by U.S. officials and Guatemalan authorities.

“After the arrest of Overdick, the narcos began to reposition, and the Zetas as well, under the careful and close watch of the military,” said Ba Tiul. “It’s not about controlling the narcos, but ensuring the business stays in their hands… as well as controlling social mobilization, which is very powerful.”

Finally, it’s been one week since Bernardo Vásquez Sánchez was killed in Oaxaca. I wrote a short piece that night, which you can read here. Protests against his assassination and Canadian mining companies in Oaxaca took place yesterday in various locations in Oaxaca and also at the Canadian Embassy in Mexico City.

–Dawn

Report from the Texas Energy Boom

The Tyee, March 19, 2012

British Columbia isn’t the only place where government and industry have ambitious plans to build pipelines to exploit shale gas reserves for the lucrative export market. Texas is booming again, and it’s setting its sights on Asia.

Yet while U.S. politicians and oil executives talk about ensuring energy self-sufficiency with cheap natural gas from shale, their long-term plans suggest a future where natural gas prices might soar — to the benefit of oil and gas companies rather than the domestic American economy.

Deborah Rogers, a financial analyst and advisory committee member at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, reckons that today’s natural gas boom may become tomorrow’s consumer squeeze. While high-profile industry players push the Pickens Plan, which proposes mass conversion of U.S. power plants and truck fleets to natural gas, the industry’s move to export natural gas will eventually drive up domestic prices.“They have these terminals that were import terminals. They went to the Department of Energy and said: ‘We are awash in gas, and we need you to flip these and make them export terminals.’ And you didn’t hear a peep about that in the media,” said Rogers, explaining that while natural gas sold for roughly $3 per thousand cubic feet (Mcf) in the U.S. in January, it was selling for about five times that in China.

“If you have somebody who’s willing to pay you $15, the domestic price is no longer going to be $3,” Rogers said. A U.S. bill fashioned after the Pickens Plan, which called for amendments to the Internal Revenue Code to allow for billions of dollars in tax credits for the production and purchase of natural gas vehicles, missed Senate approval on March 13. But the push for mass domestic conversion to natural gas is far from over. “The question isn’t if it gets passed, it’s when,” said Pickens in a statement released before the Senate vote.

Rogers isn’t convinced by the rhetoric of the Pickens Plan, which claims mass conversion to natural gas will reduce dependence on foreign oil and promote energy independence. “It’s going to have a highly inflationary effect on our economy, and yet who is going to make money?”

Rogers pauses for a split second before answering her own question. “The oil and gas operators are going to make a ton of money off that.”

Rogers started researching natural gas fracking after she noticed odours coming from drilling near her home in a rural area of Fort Worth, Texas, which sits over top of the Barnett Shale, one of the largest gas fields in the U.S. Fracking began to take off in the Barnett about five years ago, and since then there has been a stream of shale booms across the country, each touted as heralding energy independence and economic revival.

“They’ve done an incredible job of spinning it, there’s no doubt about it,” said Rogers.

Eagle Ford revival

The latest big shale play promoted by industry and government is called Eagle Ford, in southeast Texas. Remnants of past energy booms and busts already rust and rot throughout the state, visible to anyone who takes a Sunday drive along the otherwise pastoral back roads outside of San Antonio. Refineries, pipelines and storage facilities that once oozed oil have since been abandoned, and some are now classed as hazardous waste sites.

“If you were to go looking in the old oil museum, you would discover that they drilled the heck out of this country with almost no consideration at all to … ecological factors,” said Don Henry Ford Jr., a farmer and writer who lives near Seguin, Texas.

Contamination of groundwater has long been a problem. “The notion that this is something new is ridiculous, because they drilled wells without even casing the damn things through here, and we’ve had water that would blow up in your face for years in this area,” said Ford, breaking into a dry laugh.

From the 1970s to the 1990s, what experts call “the last great oil boom in Texas” took place in the same south Texas region as the Eagle Ford play, in a layer of earth known as the “Austin Chalk.” Getting gas from chalk first involved drilling vertical wells, and in the late 1980s horizontal wells were introduced together with hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

The methods used to extract fuel from chalk provided a preview of how drilling is taking place today, deeper down in shale: a heated mix of chemicals, sand and water are forced into the earth to break up hard rock, allowing gas and oil to flow from it.

Today, companies active in shale are going back to once oil-rich areas to see if there’s anything left nearby — even if it is trapped in shale, long known in the oil industry as “junk” rock.

In 2008, Petrohawk Energy drilled a well into an untapped rock formation underneath the already drained Austin Chalk, and the Eagle Ford shale play was born. As once-marginal extraction methods become mainstream, the damage to the environment rises.

“The entire formation is full of oil, but it won’t drain, so you may take one well, you drill out one way, fracture it, it runs for six months or a year, the same hole you can drill out another way, access a new area. It requires constant drilling,” said Ford, whose been around oil for as long as he can remember: his father was an oil man, first in Texas and later in Ecuador, and his brothers still work in the business.

Resource rush

Regulatory agencies don’t seem to see a problem with perpetual drilling. “Keep on drilling. Drill everywhere. Drill now. Drill, baby, drill!” said Elizabeth Ames Jones, while she was head of the Texas Railway Commission, the agency that is supposed to regulate oil and gas in Texas, last October. Ames Jones resigned at the end of February to seek election to the Texas senate.

The U.S. portion of Eagle Ford is around 80 km wide, and stretches from the Mexico border to northeast of Austin, Texas. In 2008, the same year Petrohawk struck pay dirt, the State of Texas granted 26 drilling permits. In the three years that followed, more than 3,700 additional permits for drilling in Eagle Ford were issued, and production of natural gas, together with light, sweet crude oil and condensates took off.

A slew of the world’s largest oil companies, including Halliburton, Shell, Chesapeake and Schlumberger, are already operating in Eagle Ford. Petrohawk was bought out by Australian mining giant BHP Billiton in 2011. Conglomerates from China, Japan and Korea have each spent more than $1 billion to buy into Eagle Ford.

Not only is permanent drilling part of the plan, so too are pipelines: according to documents from the Texas Railroad Commission, 188 new pipelines were permitted in Texas in 2011 alone.

There’s no doubt that some are reaping the benefits of the Eagle Ford rush. People from all over the U.S. are flocking to southeast Texas to get a shot at the action, and company trucks travel in convoy up and down the highways near San Antonio.

“It was instant, it was like overnight,” said Corley Cox, who together with her husband Jerry owns and operates The Country Store, a restaurant and convenience store in Cotulla, Texas, one of the towns best positioned to benefit from the Eagle Ford shale.

“Business has doubled in the last 18 months,” she said, as she rang in a steady stream of orders from men coming straight off the worksite to enjoy a hearty plate of tacos with beans and rice or a burger with all the fixings during the dinner-hour rush.

While the brisk business is a welcome change in the normally sleepy town, Cox says they’ve lived through a boom before, the last one about 20 years ago.

Sharon Wilson, a blogger and organizer affiliated with Earthworks’ Oil and Gas Accountability Project, concurs. “This is a boom and bust industry, so they’ve come in and made boomtowns, and as soon as they’re through they’ll leave and they’ll become ghost towns.”

Despite a history of oil and gas production, more than half of the 22 counties where drilling has taken place in Eagle Ford have poverty rates above 20 per cent. Seven of those counties count more than one in three people living below the poverty line.

In November, Wilson recorded industry insiders comparing resistance to fracking to an “insurgency” and talking about hiring former soldiers who specialized in psychological warfare to help counter anti-fracking activists. At the same conference, she taped Matt Carmichael, manager of external affairs for Anadarko Petroleum, talking about how poverty in the Eagle Ford Shale play actually helps industry.

“We’re fortunate, ah, in the Eagle Ford that, ah, that was a severely economically depressed area so we’re bringing jobs, which is helping, um…” Carmichael told conference goers. “(Eagle Ford Shale) area is economically depressed, so they only care about jobs except for the hippie types who want to raise organic chickens,” he said.

According to financial analyst Rogers, it’s not going to be protests or petitions that bring an end to the fracking boom. There’s too much money to be made. “The financial stuff, in my opinion, is what’s going to bring it down,” she said. “At the end of the day, money trumps everything.”

The U.S. is about to get a whole lot more involved in extracting Mexican oil, according to an agreement which promises to open up offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf Coast, signed Monday by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her Mexican counterpart Patricia Espinosa.

On top of pushing more underwater drilling into an area still recovering from the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, the deal foreshadows an even closer relationship between foreign oil companies and Mexico’s state owned oil company, Pemex. Though the tone of Monday’s meeting was rosy, the agreement signals increased U.S. involvement in the oil sector of a country at war.

“The government lacks the territorial control to guarantee security, as has been demonstrated in the gas deposits in the Burgos basin, and if federal authorities don’t have the capacity to provide security tocompanies on land, they will be far less able to do so in the high seas,” wrote Oscar Contreras Nava in the Gaceta, an online paper published out of Ciudad Victoria, Tamaulipas.[1] According to the U.S. State Department, “The Agreement provides a legal framework for possible commercial activities at the maritime boundary and sets clear guidelines for transboundary developments….It establishes incentives for oil and gas companies to voluntarily enter into arrangements to jointly develop any transboundary reservoirs.”[2] The U.S. Department of the Interior notes this underwater area – some of which was previously under a drilling moratorium – contains up to 172 million barrels of oil and 304 billion cubic feet of natural gas.[3]

Exactly what kind of incentives the Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement will offer to the oil and gas sector is not yet known, as the deal won’t be made public until it is presented to the Mexican senate for approval next week.

“Mrs Clinton also stressed that it would allow US companies to work in partnership with the Mexican state oil company Pemex for the first time,” reported the BBC, suggesting an even cozier relationship between the oil companies of the two nations.[4]

But it will be far from the first time US companies have worked with Pemex: on the heels of the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement, the state owned oil company sought international participation in the exploitation of the Burgos basin, located just inland from the Gulf of Mexico. The Burgos basin has since experienced over a decade of activity on the part of U.S. and international oil service companies, including Schlumberger, Halliburton, and Weatherford International.

The U.S. Geological Survey said in 2003 that Burgos could contain more than six billion barrels of undiscovered oil, and over seven trillion cubic feet of gas.[5] The Burgos basin is centered around Reynosa, Tamaulipas, covering an area about the size of Ireland in a border region that has become one of the most dangerous parts of Mexico.

Much of the violence in Tamaulipas stems from the 2010 split between the Gulf Cartel and their armed enforcement wing, Los Zetas, as well as the deployment of 8,000 troops throughout the state.[6] Ciudad Mier, which sits atop the Burgos basin, experienced intense, midday gun battles that caused at least 400 families to flee in 2010.

“In Ciudad Mier, they shot up houses, and criminal groups burned the police station,” said one young man I interviewed last year in Reynosa. “It is a war between them, but unfortunately, we carry it, the people, human beings.”

Gun battles and kidnappings of oil workers have also forced Pemex to shut down oil production at drilling rigs in the Burgos basin. “Pemex hides cases [of kidnappings], there’s more than 20 people disappeared in our union,” said another man I talked to in Reynosa, who has been working for the company his entire working life. “They just are marked down as missing work,” he said.

A military base with least 650 soldiers was opened in Ciudad Mier in December of 2011. Theft of petroleum products by organized crime is also a common occurrence. As much as 40 per cent of natural gas condensate production from Burgos is rerouted and stolen. Last spring, Pemex filed a lawsuit in Houston against ten U.S. oil and pipeline companies for collaborating with organized crime to purchase condensate stolen from the Burgos basin in Mexico.

“The cartels built tunnels and even their own pipelines to facilitate the thefts,” reads the complaint filed by Pemex. “All of the Defendants have participated and profited—knowingly or unwittingly—in the trafficking of stolen condensate in the United States and have thereby encouraged and facilitated the Mexican organized crime groups that stole the condensate,” it states. [7]

The Burgos basin is just one of the oil and gas rich areas along Mexico’s north border. New discoveries of shale oil, recoverable through a process known as fracking, have recently been announced throughout northeast Mexico, including in the states of Coahuila, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Tamaulipas, San Luis Potosí and Veracruz.[8] These regions have all been militarized as part of war on drugs.

While the agreement signed Monday appears to apply only to companies active offshore, it signals an important step in Mexico-US oil cooperation. The future of Pemex is one of the key issues in federal elections coming up this July. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate Enrique Peña Nieto, who leads in polling, has indicated that if he’s elected, privatizing Pemex will be among his priorities. “We can do what Brazil did for its oil company, not at the beginning but later, if we open shares to the public,” he told Bloomberg News last November.[9]

The transboundary hydrocarbons agreement was signed in an “informal” meeting of G-20 foreign ministers, which took place in Los Cabos, the southernmost municipality on the Baja peninsula. The meeting was a precursor to the G-20 summit, which will take place in Los Cabos in June.

Notes:

[1] Contreras Nava, O. “Tendencias: Hay convenio pero no petróleo” Retrieved February 23, 2012 from:http://www.gaceta.mx/noticiasnews.aspx?idnota=42255

[2] US State Department. “U.S. – Mexico Transboundary Hydrocarbons Agreement.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2012/02/184235.htm

[3] US Department of Interior. “Sec. Salazar Joins Mexican President Calderon, Sec. Clinton, Mexican Officials to Announce Agreement Providing Access to Nearly 1.5 Million Acres of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/Sec-Salazar-Joins-Mexican-President-Calderon-Sec-Clinton-Mexican-Officials-to-Announce-Agreement-Providing-Access-to-Nearly-1-point-5-Million-Acres-of-the-US-Outer-Continental-Shelf.cfm

[4] BBC News. “US and Mexico agree Gulf of Mexico oil cooperation.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-17108286

[5] USGS. “Assessment of Undiscovered Oil and Gas Resources of the Burgos Basin Province, Northeastern Mexico, 2003.” Retrieved February 21, 2012 from: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2004/3007/fs-2004-3007.pdf

[6] Milenio. “Llegan 8 mil soldados a Tamaulipas para reforzar seguridad.” Retrieved February 17, 2012 from: http://www.zocalo.com.mx/seccion/articulo/llegan-8-mil-soldados-a-tamaulipas-para-reforzar-seguridad

[7] U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, Houston Division. “Pemex Condensate Theft Ring Lawsuit (Complaint).” Retrieved February 24, 2012 from:http://www.archive.org/download/PemexCondensateTheftRingLawsuitcomplaint/PEP.PDF

[8] Noticias Televisa. “México descubre yacimientos de gas natural en frontera con EU.” Retrieved February 17, 2012 from: http://noticierostelevisa.esmas.com/nacional/355102/mexico-descubre-yacimientos-gas-natural-frontera-con-eu

[9] Krause-Jackson, F. Cattan, N. “Mexican Presidential Candidate Seeks Private Investment in Oil Industry.” Bloomberg News. Retrieved February 21, 2012 from:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-11-17/pena-nieto-pledges-mexican-oil-opening-calderon-found-elusive.html

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.So far, the mining company has avoided being linked with the violence by playing up the fact that people in San Jose are fighting with each other. Fortuna CEO Jorge Ganoza has repeatedly referred to it as “senseless” violence. “It is in no way related to our activities or involves company personnel, and we really hope that the people of San Jose, with the assistance of the state authorities, will find a long-term solution to this senseless violence,” Ganoza told the National Post regarding the recent killing.

The mine, known locally by the name of its subsidiary Minera Cuzcatlán, went into production in late September 2011. Its opponents maintain that Fortuna Silver’s mine is the root of the social problems that plague the once peaceful region. In a press conference following the police shooting of Méndez Vásquez, mine opponents made it clear that they see a direct link between Fortuna Silver and the violence.

“The social and political conflicts that have ended the lives of three people are due to the appearance of the mining company, without the consent of the people, and not to the control and power over the municipality as expressed by various authorities in the state government,” reads a statement signed by over a dozen Oaxacan organizations.

Today, the existence of the mining project is something that residents of San José del Progreso couldn’t ignore, even if they tried. The main access road into the town passes directly in front of Fortuna’s operations, complete with its own power station, offices, and a huge stockpile of ore, all surrounded by high chain link fence. Near the entrance to the mine, there’s fencing that looks more like the high, super resistant barrier surrounding the Canadian embassy in Mexico City, where anti-mining activists from all around the country gather regularly in outrage and protest.

In the centre of the village, which is home to about 1,200 people, Vásquez points out that there’s two different taxi stands, one used by people in favour of the mine, and another by those who are opposed. “In one year [the company] managed to cut the town in half, to divide the people, and the dispute become present in all spaces: in the primary school, in the secondary school, in the kindergarten, in the health centre, in city hall, in all of these situations,” said Vásquez.

Because of the company’s refusal to inform and properly involve the community in the decision to allow the mining company to operate in San José del Progreso, the community has been without an Ejidal (communal land owners) commission for three years.  This commission effectively exercises control over the communally owned lands in the region, without it, communal land owners are left without means of making officially recognized decisions about the fate of their territories.

City hall has effectively been shut down since January, when municipal authorities and the municipal police fled after the murder of Méndez Vásquez. “Basically the entire town is divided in two parts, one part that has a mayor, and another part that does not have a mayor,” said Vásquez, who together with others has formally requested the dissolution of powers of the municipal government.

In addition, according to sources in Oaxaca City and in the community of San José del Progreso, a group started by the mining company, called “San José in Defense of our Rights,” has taken on a paramilitary role in the community, intimidating opponents of the project.

“Things are so broken that there’s no other way out, the only way, I think, is that the company leaves,” said Father Martin Garcia Ortiz, who served as priest in San José del Progreso until he was beaten and kidnapped by those in favour of the project. He was later jailed and released without charge, and subsequently decided to leave the parish.

Vásquez, too, is determined to see to it that mine packs up and leaves. He and others are worried the project might eventually become an open pit mine, further threatening the region’s already fragile water system. Given Fortuna’s track record, there’s reason to be worried: Simon Ridgway, chair for Fortuna’s board of directors, was subject to two arrest warrants in Honduras because of environmental contamination from an open pit mine now owned by Goldcorp Inc.

“There’s no reason to negotiate with the company, there’s no parameters to say ‘okay, we’ll propose some productive projects or development projects,’ and then the next day I’ll have to leave my village,” said Vásquez. “That doesn’t make sense.”

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.