Archive for December, 2008

Twenty years after the killing of Chico Mendes, one of the world’s most prominent rainforest defenders, hundreds of human rights and environmental activists still face the threat of assassination in Brazil, a new study claims.

The report, compiled by Brazil’s Catholic Land Commission (CPT) and due to be released in full early next year, reveals that at least 260 people, among them a Catholic bishop, live under the threat of murder because of their fight against a coalition of loggers, farmers and cattle ranchers.

The list names Frei Henri des Rosiers, a French priest based in the Amazon town of Xinguara, as a particular target. Police are investigating claims he has a £14,000 price on his head because of his fight against slave labour. Also named are Maria José Dias da Costa, a union leader in the remote town of Rondon do Pará, and an Austrian bishop, Dom Erwin Krautler, who has been under 24-hour police guard for two years because of his battle against developers and child prostitution in his Amazonian diocese.

In February this year, Francisco da Silva, a 51-year-old leader of the landless movement in the Amazon, was killed with a single shot to the head. He had been named in a previous CPT report about rural leaders receiving death threats.

On Monday night the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, is expected to address the country on television to pay homage to the life of Mendes, a rubber tapper turned environmentalist who was gunned down outside his home on 22 December 1988. Lula’s address is part of a wave of tributes across Brazil, from marches on the streets of Rio de Janeiro to celebrations in his hometown of Xapuri. But while his standing as a symbol of protest is not in doubt 20 years on, environmentalists and human rights activists are divided on Mendes’s practical legacy.

In September this year government figures showed that deforestation in the Amazon had risen by 64% over the previous 12 months. Earlier this month, members of Ibama, Brazil’s environmental taskforce, discovered that nearly 3,000 hectares (7,410 acres) had been deforested, mostly illegally, inside a reserve named after Mendes. “Each year on 22 December I ask myself if he died in vain or not. And today, after all these years, the answer is not yet clear to me,” said Alfredo Sirkis, a prominent member of Brazil’s Green party and friend of Mendes.

Sirkis said: “I won’t say that nothing has improved,” but he added that the last 20 years had seen a “continuation of this project of devastation”.

Born in the remote Amazon state of Acre on 15 December 1944, Francisco Alves Mendes Filho followed in his parents’ footsteps early in life, becoming a rubber tapper at the age of nine.

By the mid-1980s he was spearheading protests against local cattle ranchers and their gunmen, who sought to tear down the forest and drive out the impoverished rubber tappers. Renowned for visionary views on sustainable development, Mendes quickly became a poster-boy for the international green movement, travelling to the US to lobby against infrastructure projects he believed would devastate the Amazon.

“He knew how to talk to the rubber tapper in the middle of the forest in the same way he knew how to talk to a technocrat from the World Bank,” said Sirkis. His murder turned him into an eco-martyr both at home and abroad, and catapulted the issue of rainforest destruction further up the international agenda.

“Chico left a great legacy,” said Brazil’s former environment minister, the senator and former rubber tapper Marina Silva. “Twenty years on, the environmental question has gained strength across the whole world.”

She added: “He was a guy that spoke of things which were ahead of his time … [and he] made me want to be part of that fight.”

Bishop Krautler agrees: “It was never in vain. In death he [Mendes] spoke even louder than when he was alive.”

Soon after his death, Brazil’s government began introducing the “extractivist reserves” of which Mendes had dreamed. The reserves were areas of rainforest where local populations could earn their living while simultaneously protecting the environment. The first, created in 1990, was named after him and now covers 11m hectares of land.
Chico Mendes: Martyr for our times

When I heard, 20 years ago this week, that Chico Mendes, leader of the Brazilian rubber tappers’ union, had been murdered, I was sad but not surprised. The last time I saw Chico, five months earlier in the town of Xapuri in the western state of Acre, he told me the ranchers had already tried to kill him six times.

Looking at my notebooks, I now notice that Chico actually named the man later convicted of organising his killing: Darly Alves da Silva, a rancher who has not been seen since escaping from jail where he was serving a sentence for the crime.

Darly already had a murder charge against him in another state, something Chico reported to the police.

It was when Chico’s union successfully defended a piece of virgin rainforest sprinkled with rubber trees against the ranchers’ attempts to claim it that the struggle became personal. Before the shooting of Mendes only 10 people had ever been brought to court for around 1,000 murders in the Amazon in the 1980s.

But Chico was different and his murder sparked an international furore.

In his speeches he used to say: “Come here and kill me. My chest is open.” He knew he might achieve more by his death than he had by his life.

Today the extractive reserves Chico championed are relatively successful in protecting parts of the Amazon, as are reserves run by the rainforest’s indigenous people.

Now people talk of using carbon credits to protect similar areas around the world. And I realise that I had met the martyr for our times – the Gandhi, or perhaps the Che Guevara, of our environmental age.
Charles Clover

Via Guardian UK

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

By A.C. Thompson
This article appeared in the January 5, 2009 edition of The Nation.

The way Donnell Herrington tells it, there was no warning. One second he was trudging through the heat. The next he was lying prostrate on the pavement, his life spilling out of a hole in his throat, his body racked with pain, his vision blurred and distorted.

It was September 1, 2005, some three days after Hurricane Katrina crashed into New Orleans, and somebody had just blasted Herrington, who is African-American, with a shotgun. “I just hit the ground. I didn’t even know what happened,” recalls Herrington, a burly 32-year-old with a soft drawl.

The sudden eruption of gunfire horrified Herrington’s companions–his cousin Marcel Alexander, then 17, and friend Chris Collins, then 18, who are also black. “I looked at Donnell and he had this big old hole in his neck,” Alexander recalls. “I tried to help him up, and they started shooting again.” Herrington says he was staggering to his feet when a second shotgun blast struck him from behind; the spray of lead pellets also caught Collins and Alexander. The buckshot peppered Alexander’s back, arm and buttocks.

Herrington shouted at the other men to run and turned to face his attackers: three armed white males. Herrington says he hadn’t even seen the men or their weapons before the shooting began. As Alexander and Collins fled, Herrington ran in the opposite direction, his hand pressed to the bleeding wound on his throat. Behind him, he says, the gunmen yelled, “Get him! Get that nigger!”

The attack occurred in Algiers Point. The Point, as locals call it, is a neighborhood within a neighborhood, a small cluster of ornate, immaculately maintained 150-year-old houses within the larger Algiers district. A nationally recognized historic area, Algiers Point is largely white, while the rest of Algiers is predominantly black. It’s a “white enclave” whose residents have “a kind of siege mentality,” says Tulane University historian Lance Hill, noting that some white New Orleanians “think of themselves as an oppressed minority.”

A wide street lined with towering trees, Opelousas Avenue marks the dividing line between Algiers Point and greater Algiers, and the difference in wealth between the two areas is immediately noticeable. “On one side of Opelousas it’s ‘hood, on the other side it’s suburbs,” says one local. “The two sides are totally opposite, like muddy and clean.”

Algiers Point has always been somewhat isolated: it’s perched on the west bank of the Mississippi River, linked to the core of the city only by a ferry line and twin gray steel bridges. When the hurricane descended on Louisiana, Algiers Point got off relatively easy. While wide swaths of New Orleans were deluged, the levees ringing Algiers Point withstood the Mississippi’s surging currents, preventing flooding; most homes and businesses in the area survived intact. As word spread that the area was dry, desperate people began heading toward the west bank, some walking over bridges, others traveling by boat. The National Guard soon designated the Algiers Point ferry landing an official evacuation site. Rescuers from the Coast Guard and other agencies brought flood victims to the ferry terminal, where soldiers loaded them onto buses headed for Texas.

Facing an influx of refugees, the residents of Algiers Point could have pulled together food, water and medical supplies for the flood victims. Instead, a group of white residents, convinced that crime would arrive with the human exodus, sought to seal off the area, blocking the roads in and out of the neighborhood by dragging lumber and downed trees into the streets. They stockpiled handguns, assault rifles, shotguns and at least one Uzi and began patrolling the streets in pickup trucks and SUVs. The newly formed militia, a loose band of about fifteen to thirty residents, most of them men, all of them white, was looking for thieves, outlaws or, as one member put it, anyone who simply “didn’t belong.”

Via The Nation

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

By BILL LODGE
* Advocate staff writer

Albert Woodfox has spent more than half his 61 years at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. And Woodfox will remain there until at least March while a federal appellate panel decides whether he should be released pending a third trial for his alleged murder of a security officer.

The panel will hear oral arguments in the case in March.

The decision was announced today by a three-member panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

U.S. District Judge James J. Brady of Baton Rouge overturned Woodfox’ conviction and ruled last month that he should be released from prison until the next trial for the 1972 fatal stabbing of 23-year-old Officer Brent Miller.

But Louisiana Attorney General James D. ‘Buddy’ Caldwell appealed to the 5th Circuit, arguing that Woodfox poses a potential threat to society because he was serving a 50-year sentence for armed robbery at the time of Miller?s death and has never been prosecuted on at least 10 armed robbery and aggravated rape charges pending since the 1960s in Orleans Parish.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Dozens of protesters gathered Thursday night in front of the Palos Verdes Estates home of Daniel Niemann, president of a development company accused of failing to pay day laborers.

Niemann Properties, along with a subcontractor, is the target of an ongoing class-action lawsuit filed in May by more than 100 day laborers, who said they were never compensated for work done on a condominium project in Hollywood last year.

A day-laborer advocacy group has held protests at the project site, the Rolling Hills Estates company headquarters, and now at Niemann’s home.

“We want to make sure Mr. Niemann is reminded that over 100 families are not going to be able to share a nice meal at Christmastime due to his company not doing what’s right,” said Marco Amador, a spokesman for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. “Maybe next time we’ll go to his church.”

Niemann said in a statement that the laborers should focus their frustration at Alpha Co., the subcontractor that allegedly failed to issue proper payment.

“The protesters are directing their anger in the wrong place and at the wrong people,” he said.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!