The home of the couple Myriam Vargas and Carlos Flores Sólis, located in Zacatepec, Puebla, was raided three times last April. In the last assault, which occurred on the 14th of that month, they took stationery and a backpack containing badges of political acts. Earlier, on the 5th, they left a knife on the bed.
Both are members of the People's Front for the Defense of Water and Land of Morelos, Puebla and Tlaxcala (FPDATMPT), a collective that has been actively fighting since the summer of 2012 against the Morelos Integral Project, the government plan to generate electricity in the central area of the country.
The attacks against opponents of the project are not new, said Vargas, who is also a community communicator.
“One of the first was the arrest of Jaime Domínguez (also an activist of the collective), arrested by the Single Police Command in 2013, in the area of Apatlaco, Morelos, during a protest against the advance of the aqueduct,” Vargas said in an interview.
Since then, during the progress of the project and the consequent resistance, the activists have suffered imprisonment, threats, harassment and judicial harassment.
The case that has hit this People's Front the most is that of the activist Samir Flores Soberanes, who was assassinated in the early morning of April 20, 2019 in Amilcingo, Morelos, three days before the Public Consultation on the Federal Government's energy project.
According to the “Report on the Situation of Individuals and Communities Defending Environmental Human Rights 2021”, from the Mexican Center for Environmental Law (Cemda), so far in the current administration, headed by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, at least 58 environmental and territorial defenders have been murdered.
Although lethal aggression is the most extreme case of violence against environmental activists, it also occurs in other ways, with kidnappings, harassment, threats, and others.
In 2021 alone, the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders registered 108 attacks on environmental activists, the highest number in the last eight years. Of those, 25 had their lives taken.
Oaxaca is, according to the data, the most dangerous state in the country for environmental defenders, with 24 registered attacks, followed by Sonora and Yucatán, with 10, respectively.
Infogram Defenders
These figures only correspond to attacks that resulted in a formal complaint or, at least, a registration by the Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders. However, the number is higher than the official number, as there are those who decide not to report.
The Federal Mechanism for the Protection of Journalists and Human Rights Defenders is one of the institutional tools that exist in Mexico to protect the lives and integrity of activists.
To date, there are 256 registered environmental defenders in this body. For this year, the federal government made a contribution to the fund of 380 million 298 thousand pesos, Segob reported via transparency. The figure is 29% lower than in 2021, when the total amount reached 532 million 977 thousand pesos, the highest budget in its history.
Of the total number of people enrolled in the Mechanism, more than half, 133, were attacked directly by public servants.
Jesús Cahum, leader of the Rio Chacmochuc Community Surveillance Committee, in the northern area of Quintana Roo, has been beaten and threatened with death. Their presence is uncomfortable for poachers and people who cut down mangroves to make housing subdivisions, he told Journalism Causa Natura.
However, he has decided not to report. “It's a waste of time, it's no use, the authorities are the same people who set foot in you,” he said.
Cahúm said that when he filed a complaint with the Federal Attorney for Environmental Protection (Profepa) for the felling and filling of mangroves, the same agency “threw him on his head” before the offenders. “Because of them they told me to beat me,” he added.
The struggles of environmental defenders are manifold. According to the Cemda report, most of the attacks occur in sectors where mining is involved, followed by the issue of water and electrical energy. Problems related to the forestry sector, communication routes and tourism also stand out.
Roberto de la Rosa has been resisting the Frisco-Tayahua Mine, in the community of Salaverna, Zacatecas, owned by Carlos Slim Helú's Frisco company, for more than a decade.
Although the project began in 1998, it was not until 2010 when pressure intensified for local residents to agree to be relocated, claiming that there were risks to human settlements, he told Journalism Causa Natura.
The objective, he added, was to exploit the open-pit mine. Many families agreed to leave their homes, in exchange for a house in comfort elsewhere and compensation of 15,000 pesos. Others were relocated in later years.
There are only seven families left in the community. “Some people want to reach an agreement. They're not going to do it with me, mining kills all the life around me, it kills the water, the vegetation, I'm going to stay here,” he said.
On December 23, 2016, under the pretext of an alleged geological fault that put people's lives at risk, officials from the Zacatecas Ministry of the Interior entered the community with machinery to violently evict the remaining houses. They demolished the church, the school and the municipal delegation, but a group of residents resisted.
De la Rosa pointed out that one of the mining company's last actions was to fence off the community, to prevent access. When the workers tried to advance the fence, residents of the community ran them away. Today, both Roberto and his son are criminally accused of death threats against these workers.
“We defended ourselves,” he said.
Capital, a key factor
Violence against environmental and territorial defenders is based on economic interest, of some exploitation project or infrastructure.
Pablo Reyna Esteves, a specialist in social conflicts related to environment and development, explained that this is not a phenomenon exclusive to Mexico, but rather that it is a dynamic of pressure from large companies -legal and illegal- in practically all of Latin America.
When Reyna talks about illegal companies, she refers to groups such as organized crime.
“There is a dispute over the resources that exist in the territories, for the deployment of megaproject infrastructures, mining infrastructures, for the forestry industry, tourism and others. This is the need for capitalism to accumulate access, control, exploitation and the accumulation of natural resources,” he said.
To this end, they rely on State laws and institutions. “Whether on the right or on the left, things don't change, because let's just say that what's there is a kind of extractivism,” said the director of Advocacy Programs at the Ibero-American University.
Cesar Enrique Pineda, doctor in Social Sciences and academic at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, said that investments, both private and State, seek to control territories and their natural assets from a position of power that is asymmetric with local communities.
Pineda focuses his research on the contradiction between capital and nature, as well as community social movements. The specialist explained in an interview that over the past 20 years there has been great resistance to extractive projects, especially in mining.
This situation has reached, he said, even the reports of the Inter-American Bank, since communities are seen as an obstacle to realizing investments that, in the future, will lead to profits.
“It's no small thing to say that the great powers, with their strategic vision, are able to see that community powers are a very important obstacle to their economic interests,” he said.
For this reason, he said, many companies have sought to legitimize their projects in relation to the environment, through advertising campaigns or other resources.
“These are strategies that some authors call 'soft strategy' in relation to conflict, which fall into this assumption of incorporating some mitigations or modifications so that their impacts are smaller, and thus calming communities. Another resource is land rent, because communities are given money and some accept,” he told Journalism Causa Natura.
Another strategy commonly used in the midst of conflicts, he added, is the destruction of community unity, or overt repression or espionage.
“It can be one or a combination of hard and soft strategies of big capital to achieve their objective, which is to maintain the flow of natural goods for production,” he concluded.
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