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Young activists poured into the Scottish city to demand action from leaders, as the focus of the official event turned toward the impact of climate change on future generations.
But in the headline speech of the demonstration, Thunberg told crowds that "history will judge them poorly," calling the pivotal conference "a global north greenwash festival" and "a two-week long celebration of business as usual."
"Many are starting to ask themselves, what will it take for the people in power to wake up? But let's be clear: they are already wake. They know exactly what they are doing," she said.
"The leaders are not doing nothing. They are actively creating loopholes ... to benefit themselves."
Her remarks come after several of the major players present at the conference talked up the achievements of the first week. Leaders have so far announced a series of climate pledges at the conference, including a deforestation commitment, a deal on coal and a plan to stop investing public finances into fossil fuel projects abroad.
But many of the young activists in Glasgow urged more radical commitments, as the United Nations warned that the world is not adapting fast enough to the climate crisis.
Thousands of demonstrators covered the city's streets on Friday, with many bearing placards that warned of the effects of rising temperatures and extreme weather events.
Young Filipino climate advocate Jan Karmel Guillermo told crowds the summit was a "crucial moment" in the climate crisis.
Thunberg spoke to protesters more than three years after she founded the "Fridays for Future" school strikes movement that galvanized youth action over climate change.
"Some people say that we are being too radical," she told an adoring audience. "But the truth is that they are the ones who are radical. Fighting to save our life supporting systems isn't radical at all."
"We don't need any more distant, non binding pledges. We don't need any more empty promises."
Thunberg's speech came after a week in which she has been mobbed by supporters and members of the media.
Crowds chanted "We are unstoppable, another world is possible," and other slogans as they attempted to attract attention near the venue. A large police contingent corralled crowds as they grew throughout the morning.
Daisy Deakin, a 7-year-old from Glasgow accompanied by her mother Isabel, said she wanted to come to the protest to see Thunberg.
"She saves the world from climate change," she told CNN, as she displayed a sign saying "Save our planet."
"Our parents will die from old age. Our children will die from climate change," warned a banner carried by 22-year-old Maia Runciman, originally from Texas and now living in Glasgow.
"I'm here to push world leaders to put the [climate] policies in place and protect the world for the future," she said.
During the event, young climate leaders from around the world presented the Global Youth Statement to high-level delegates, relishing the opportunity to bring the youth perspective to the high-profile summit.
Young people have been "traditionally excluded entirely from global climate negotiations," said Guillermo.
But on Friday, young people were also the focus of the summit. The theme of the event's fifth day was "youth and public empowerment," with leaders seeking to appeal to younger audiences worldwide as they pressed ahead with negotiations.
"I talk to people who are frustrated all the time, and I consider myself one of the frustrated," the United States' climate envoy John Kerry said in response to protests outside.
Cordelia Murray-Brown, 14, told CNN she had missed school to attend the protest, and criticized global leaders for flying to the summit. "It's a good thing that the leaders are here but it also defeats the purpose since they all took planes to come here ... I think there's now enough people for them to listen. I think they are making promises they know they can't keep."
"I'm frustrated. I just want them to do what they say they'd do," Prudence Stamp, 18, added.
Chief Justice John Roberts. (photo: Jim Watson/Getty Images)
In North Carolina, GOP lawmakers are redrawing maps that are neither unconstitutional nor illegal—yet skew heavily in their favor.
The problem is that North Carolina isn’t really a red state. Its electorate is roughly evenly split. In 2020, Donald Trump edged Joe Biden by 1.3 percentage points, but more than half of the state’s votes for U.S. House seats went to Democratic candidates—yet Republicans still won 10 of 13 races. The state has a Democratic governor.
North Carolina Republicans are doing this because it increases their power, and because they can. They control the legislature, which draws the maps, and state law says the governor cannot veto the maps. Besides, they have reason to believe no court will stop them, given the Supreme Court’s 2019 decision washing its hands of concerns about partisan gerrymanders. Although Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that highly distorted maps—like this new one from North Carolina—are “incompatible with democratic principles,” he also said the high court had no standing to interfere.
In a now-infamous statement in 2016, one North Carolina Republican state representative, David Lewis, noted, “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” The legislature was then drawing new maps because its initial post-2010-census maps had been thrown out as an unconstitutional gerrymander.
As Lewis wrote with Senator Ralph Hise in The Atlantic, the remark was not a Kinsley gaffe but an affirmation that the maps were designed for partisan advantage and not to discriminate racially. “You don’t need to agree with the statement, and you don’t need to support partisan considerations in redistricting,” the pair wrote. They were just explaining, for the benefit of federal judges and anyone else who was listening, what they were about to do. Now, with the Supreme Court’s tacit permission, the Republicans are doing it again.
Most states redistrict every 10 years, after new census data become available. But in North Carolina, redistricting has become a constant hobby, alongside drinking craft beer, making fun of Charlotte, and griping about Ted Valentine. In 2010, Republicans took control of both chambers of the legislature for the first time since 1870. They promptly got to work, including drawing new maps after the 2010 census, as well as passing bills to make voting harder. Those maps were repeatedly and successfully challenged in state and federal courts for being unconstitutional.
The legislative maps that elected the current general assembly are constitutional—at least no court has said otherwise—but they are deeply gerrymandered, skewing the results toward Republicans in a more or less evenly divided state. In 2020, the GOP won a tiny majority of the votes for state House (49.99 percent to 49.06) but took 69 seats to Democrats’ 51. On the Senate side, they won the aggregate popular vote 50.8 percent to 47.9, and won 28 of 50 seats.
After the U.S. House maps were tossed in 2016 as unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, Republicans designed new ones that relied on solely partisan data, not race (though there’s a strong correlation between Black and Democratic voters in North Carolina). Progressive groups challenged those, too, taking them all the way to the Supreme Court, which had previously shied away from ruling against partisan gerrymanders. A certain amount of politicization was inevitable, the Court had previously concluded; who were they to say what was too much?
The plaintiffs brought elaborate new mathematical measures to demonstrate the egregiousness of the North Carolina maps, as well as Democrat-drawn ones in Maryland, but Roberts’s majority opinion slammed the door shut on federal-court action against partisan gerrymanders, saying it was a matter for state courts or Congress. (Democrats in Congress have since tried to pass legislation addressing the problem but have been blocked by Senate Republicans.)
Ahead of the new round of map-drawing, looking for a better PR strategy, North Carolina Republicans announced that they would use neither racial nor political data to draw the new maps. Nonetheless, the maps the GOP majority adopted seem precisely designed to squeeze the maximum Republican advantage.
“This gerrymander is more than just an effective gerrymander. It’s an extremely efficient one,” Asher Hildebrand, a public-policy professor at Duke University and a former Democratic congressional staffer, told me. (I am an adjunct journalism professor at Duke’s public-policy school.)
Republican map-drawers may not have had access to partisan data, but they probably didn’t need them in order to draw such ruthlessly efficient maps: As successful politicians, they likely know their districts down to the precinct level, even without referring to other data. Beyond that, they have a decade of experience tussling over the districts from which to work.
Republicans have attributed the lean of their maps to the state’s existing partisan geography: Democrats are highly concentrated in cities such as Raleigh, Greensboro, Charlotte, and Durham, while Republicans are spread elsewhere. They have a point, to a point. Democrats’ clustering in urban areas is a growing problem for the party. But outside groups and Democrats also produced proposed maps that would have been more evenly balanced, or less tilted toward Republicans.
I live in North Carolina, and I’ve sensed something of a nonchalance about the map-drawing process this fall. Maybe that’s because of gerrymandering fatigue, and maybe it’s because everyone expected Republicans to draw maps that created as many GOP safe seats as possible, but everyone has also always known the matter would end up in court. The legislature’s maps are just an appetizer.
Plaintiffs including the NAACP and the voting-rights group Common Cause filed suit last week, even before the maps had been adopted. The Democratic election super-lawyer Marc Elias filed another case Friday afternoon. “I hear it is perfect weather to be in court in North Carolina right now,” Elias tweeted this week. (Republicans say these suits are about gaining partisan advantage, just like their own maps.)
But judges may not be as helpful to Democrats in the 2020s as they were in the 2010s. The U.S. Supreme Court decision on partisan gerrymandering rules out one avenue. Cases that center on race are getting harder too: The Court has continued to weaken the Voting Rights Act, and plaintiffs may approach new cases with trepidation, fearful that the more conservative Court could go further. That leaves state courts, but those might be less favorable now too. A Republican now leads the state supreme court, and although Democrats retain a 4–3 edge, they may lose it in 2022.
This makes for a bleak landscape. Any scheme that takes a roughly 50-50 population and produces a result as skewed as 10–4 or 11–3 in House seats can hardly be called fair or democratic, as Roberts acknowledged. Yet that doesn’t mean the arrangement is unconstitutional or illegal. With the courts walking away, the only remedy is for proponents of a fairer system to win legislatures and Congress and change the laws—a task that slanted maps make harder, if not impossible, to achieve.
Pro-Trump supporters breeched security and entered the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as Congress debated the 2020 presidential election electoral vote certification. Even after the riot, election subversion is not an animating issue for most voters. (photo: Brent Stirton/Getty Images)
"One of our great political parties has embraced the idea that our last election was fraudulent, that our current president is illegitimate, that they must move legislatures across the country to fix the results, to fix the results of future elections," said Maine Sen. Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, in a floor speech arguing in favor of a voting rights bill that was ultimately defeated by a Republican filibuster.
The fix King is talking about are laws passed by Republican state legislatures that could make it harder to cast a ballot and would give partisan Republicans a greater role in certifying elections.
But state legislatures can already determine the outcome of the 2024 election without changing any laws, says Rick Hasen, co-director of the Fair Elections and Free Speech Center at the University of California, Irvine.
"I don't think there needs to be one law that needs to be passed in any state," he says. "You would just need state legislatures to come together or members of Congress to come together and decide that they're going to not follow the rules."
Hasen's nightmare scenario for 2024 is that in key battleground states, legislators who, according to the Constitution are responsible for certifying Electoral College results, say something like this: "'There were irregularities in the election. We can't be sure who the winner is. We've got to appoint an alternative slate of electors.' "
Those slates of electors are sent to Congress, which is then controlled by Republicans who count the GOP electors rather the Democratic electors.
"That's what Trump was trying to get to happen," Hasen says. "That's why the question is whether 2020 was a failed coup or a dress rehearsal for 2024."
Limited options for Democrats
So what can Democrats do about this?
They're fighting these Republican laws in court. They'd like to pass federal legislation, but that means convincing West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a conservative Democrat, to agree to an exception to the filibuster, the procedural motion whereby the opposition party can block a bill from advancing without 60 votes. Manchin has so far resisted all calls to change the filibuster.
"If there's not going to be an actual policy solution to a lot of the subversion elements, then the only option available to you is a political one," says Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican who started the group Defending Democracy Together.
"So right now, Trump is going around endorsing candidates who, for the most part, bolster and repeat his claims that the election were stolen. They also say openly that they would potentially not certify the 2024 elections, depending on how they turn out," Longwell says. "And so you have to beat candidates like that."
In particular, Longwell is talking about candidates for secretary of state, state legislature and county clerks, all of whom have a role to play in ensuring that an election is fairly administrated.
But Republicans tend to pay a lot more attention to those kinds of races than Democrats, says former Ohio Democratic Party Chair David Pepper.
"So much of the problem is at the statehouse level and most people, they cannot name their statehouse member. They have no idea what those people's power is. Individual citizens have to really, you know, get involved," Pepper says. "If one side is relentlessly attacking democracy and the other side runs out of gas, the attacks on democracy will succeed."
Disengaged voters
Democrats have another problem. Even after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, election subversion is not an animating issue for most voters.
"It's what I would call a low-salience issue," says Longwell, who also runs voter focus groups and has a podcast called "The Focus Group" published by The Bulwark.
Most of the people in Longwell's groups are like Farah, a swing voter from Georgia (NPR agreed to only use the first name of focus group participants).
"I think if a candidate says that they did certify and support the results or not, it's just a non-issue for me," says Farah.
Democratic strategist Doug Thornell says the issue of election subversion does matter to key parts of the Democratic base, especially young voters and people of color.
"But it's complicated, it's not that easy," he says. "It can have a boomerang effect where it ends up sort of causing people to be frustrated and stay home. You don't want that."
While the idea of future election subversion is a complicated one for Democrats to explain to their voters, for Republicans, says Longwell, the false charge that the last election was stolen is actually a big motivator.
When Wyoming Republican U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney wouldn't accept Trump's false claims that the election was stolen from him, she was kicked out of House Republican leadership.
"When [Minority Leader] Kevin McCarthy said that Liz Cheney could no longer be in leadership because she was off message, what he meant was, 'Our message going into 2022 is that the election was stolen. That is a turnout mechanism for us in 2022,' " says Longwell.
As this week's elections show, Republicans don't have to cheat to win. The election in Virginia was high turnout and free of fraud.
But what Democrats and their allies worry about is that in 2024, Republican legislatures in states like Arizona and Georgia erect enough barriers to the ballot and destroy enough democratic norms so that their party simply cannot lose a close race.
Heavily armed soldiers stand guard outside the Xatruch task force base in Tocoa, Honduras on July, 24th, 2021. (photo: Seth Berry/The Intercept)
García knew the message was serious. Rumor had it he’d been placed on a kill list of five land rights activists in Honduras. The first of the five, his friend Juan Manuel Moncada, had been assassinated just four days earlier.
At around 10 o’clock that night, the presumed messengers made good on their threat: Four or five men with balaclavas, bulletproof vests, and AK-47s rolled up on motorcycles and surrounded García’s property, where they proceeded to chat and smoke cigarettes while looking over the barbed wire fence into his adobe-walled house. García lay inside, paralyzed with fear.
He said they looked like soldiers. But they weren’t. They were paramilitaries who, in a resurgent campaign of violence and aggression that began this summer, have been targeting a land rights cooperative trying to protect land it retook from a corporate palm oil giant.
“When you see a soldier show up in front of your house,” García said of the July encounter, “you realize they aren’t a soldier, they’re there to murder you.”
Honduras’s Hot Zone
García lives in the community of Panamá, in the Bajo Aguán Valley, a “hot zone” notorious as one of the country’s most militarized regions. Land conflicts in the Aguán date back to the early 1990s, when Dinant, a Central American transnational and consumer goods corporation specializing in African palm oil production, began buying off collective farmlands, ultimately obtaining a majority of farmlands in the region. The purchases were carried out in an environment of killings, disappearances, and death threats against campesino or rural leaders and were contested by human rights workers, journalists, and the farmers themselves.
After a 2009 U.S.-backed military coup, many campesinos reoccupied the farms — spurring a campaign of largely targeted assassinations by private security guards and Honduran security forces that left over 150 farmers dead. In 2014, international pressure momentarily put the brakes on the killing spree by disparate armed actors, opening a new era of conflict in which well-organized paramilitary groups became the main drivers of violence. Leading the two largest groups were a former soldier and a private guard who previously provided security for Dinant, with other former soldiers, police officers, and private security guards among their ranks.
The paramilitaries’ strategy begins with infiltrating social movements, killing off key members, and then installing armed groups inside communities to terrorize their residents into exile or silence, according to eyewitness testimony, interviews with more than a dozen local residents, and affidavits made on behalf of asylum-seekers in the U.S. If successful, the armed groups will extinguish land rights movements and seize back control of the palm oil lands Dinant claims as its own.
Residents of the Aguán valley say the military is complicit in the paramilitary violence. Some residents claim that the military has armed the paramilitaries, while others argue that the military, given its omnipresence in the region, is at minimum aware of the paramilitary units and has done little to stop their violence.
Those suspicions were inflamed after photos began circulating on social media of a paramilitary leader at an event with Honduran soldiers in the Aguán this spring: “The context of the photos is what we’ve been submitting complaints [to the authorities] about already,” said Hipólito Rivas, a local activist who’s faced death threats from the armed group, “that as the head of the paramilitary group, we confirmed that he has support from the Army.”
Honduran special forces had already been entangled with a paramilitary group that infiltrated a farmer organization in the village of La Confianza in the mid-2010s, according to an affidavit from a human rights worker that two Hondurans submitted as part of their applications for asylum in the U.S. The affidavit details how a former special forces officer, Celio Rodríguez, joined land rights movements, including MUCA (“Unified Campesino Movement of the Aguán,” per its Spanish acronym), and then rose to a leadership position under the pretense he’d protect communities from violence. But he turned out to be organizing a paramilitary death squad. The members of Grupo de Celio, as it is known, were frequently seen in contact with an active-duty special forces commander named German Alfaro, who was the head of the Xatruch, an elite military police task force, and then later FUSINA, another special forces unit active in the Aguán, according to the affidavit. Grupo de Celio was also seen doing military training on a palm plantation with soldiers and a well-known assassin named Osvin Caballero, now in prison on account of several high-profile murders.
The Intercept was not able to independently confirm the existence of a relationship between the Honduran military and the paramilitary forces, and a Xatruch official interviewed by The Intercept declined to comment on the subject of paramilitarism in the valley. In 2016, the Xatruch were accused of death squad activity. The Xatruch is one of several Honduran military units that has received extensive U.S. military training over the last decade. The Pentagon describes these partnerships as part of an effort to “combat transnational crime.”
Such training occurred as recently as July, when the Xatruch representative told The Intercept that his unit was being trained by members of the U.S. Army from Joint Task Force-Bravo, from the nearby base in Puerto Castilla. “Right now, they’re giving us training on how to conduct operations and fight delinquency,” he said. “The training already began this week.” The Pentagon and State Department did not respond to questions about the recent Xatruch training.
Dinant, too, has ties to the Xatruch. Up until 2018, Dinant had loaned a shed on its property to the Xatruch for the purpose of patrolling the area, according to a company spokesperson and an April 2015 document the company filed with the International Finance Corporation — the private lending arm of the World Bank, which supported Dinant with millions of dollars in loans. “Dinant briefly granted temporary basic shelter for taskforce members patrolling the communities around the plantation,” the spokesperson, Roger Pineda Pinel, told The Intercept.
Residents are suspicious of Dinant, which has relied numerous times over the last decade on the military and police to crack down on campesinos occupying lands claimed by the company.
The company has previously been implicated in violence against land defenders: In a 2017 civil lawsuit against the International Finance Corporation, families from the Aguán accused the IFC of funding human rights abuses by funneling World Bank money to Dinant and stated that “Dinant also hired (and continues to hire) paramilitary death squads and hired assassins.” Dinant’s spokesperson was dismissive of the allegations at the time. A 2014 Human Rights Watch report, which investigated 29 killings in the valley (out of over 100 that had taken place), suggested “the possible involvement of private security guards” in 13 of the deaths. Dinant issued a lengthy response to HRW investigators, denying responsibility for the violence. Asked about it by The Intercept, Pineda said that Dinant “has a zero tolerance policy for abuses” and it “conducts its business in a just and lawful manner.”
Pineda said that Dinant is the rightful owner of the contested lands in the Aguán and that the company has no connection to “so-called paramilitary groups.”
“The allegations that you raise have long been discredited by even our most ardent critics. As we have stated before, over the last decade Dinant has been the subject of a number of credible and independent inquiries and investigations,” Pineda wrote in a statement, pointing to the IFC’s monitoring of Dinant’s activities, an International Criminal Court report on Honduras, and a review by Foley Hoag, a corporate law firm commissioned by Dinant. “Without exception, these have found no evidence that Dinant ever conducted illegal activities, used inappropriate force, or conspired against any person or organization.”
Pineda added that “a more accurate article on the Aguan would describe how more and more armed criminals are invading private farms, damaging business, stealing produce, and threatening local people and jobs; how some farms have been occupied continuously by criminal gangs for over three years without punishment; and how the constant threat of violence is damaging local economies, increasing unemployment, and forcing hard-working families to migrate out of desperation.”
Last spring, paramilitaries began targeting activists from the Movement for the Refoundation of Gregorio Chávez, named for a land defender whom other activists say was killed by Dinant private security guards in 2012. (Dinant has denied the claim.) The movement has occupied about half of the Dinant-run Paso Aguán palm plantation near Panamá since Chávez was killed. The leader of the paramilitary group accused of the recent violence, Santos Torres, was a private security contractor who worked on Dinant properties and joined the land defender collective in 2012, then broke off to form an armed group several years later.
In La Confianza, residents told The Intercept last month that they have recently seen uniformed policemen and a local politician visit the homes of known gunmen and affiliates of Grupo de Celio. On October 10, Oscar Javier Pérez, a witness to two highly publicized murders by the paramilitary group was himself assassinated at home in a village adjacent to La Confianza.
The paramilitary units in Panamá and La Confianza are notorious in the Agúan, where armed groups have entered a number of other communities: A 2019 Honduran media report about a group of armed men that had appeared in the community of Trinidad noted that “this group has the same characteristics of those operated in La Confianza by Celio Rodríguez and in Panamá by Santos Torres.”
State authorities typically blame the land defenders themselves for the violence being inflicted on them, said Jaime Cabrera, an activist in the community of Panamá, who has been threatened by armed groups and who was also named on the kill list. “The government discourse,” he said, “has always been that the campesinos are just killing each other.”
“He Never Did Anything Wrong”
Ever since he began receiving the messages, their taunting invective almost identical to the texts sent to the other men on the kill list, Juan Manuel Moncada knew he’d be murdered.
“Amor, they’re going to kill me,” his wife Esmilda Rodas recalled him telling her in the weeks before his death. Rodas and other friends recall Manuel Moncada as bright and easy-going, but the last weeks of his life were filled with despair. On July 6, he was gunned down by two men at a crowded bank in downtown Tocoa.
“He never did anything wrong,” his wife said, pain still in her voice, speaking beneath the canopy of banana and guava trees at their adobe house in Panamá. Fearing for the safety of her oldest son, Rodas has since sent him to the United States without legal documents — one of many young residents to leave home in recent months, including two leaders of the land rights movement in Panamá.
On paper, Manuel Moncada should have been protected from such an act of violence: He was one of at least eight members of the Gregorio Chávez movement who’d been granted protections in 2019 by Honduras’s National Protection System (SNP, by its Spanish acronym) — a government program to defend imperiled activists — after leaders of the movement compiled and presented evidence of systematic violence against them. He was supposed to be able to call the police when he felt his life was in danger. But his wife and friends recall that the police never showed up when he called. “He had protective measures,” said García, “but only to say they had them, because he never benefited from them.”
Amid that security vacuum, the Grupo de Torres has been targeting land defenders in Panamá, residents said. The group, residents told The Intercept, is based on a Dinant-owned section of the adjacent Paso Aguán plantation known as “the Ocho,” several kilometers from Panamá and accessible via two roads through the plantation. Satellite imagery from August 2020 shows a collection of huts on a part of the plantation consistent with the location described by residents. Pineda, the Dinant spokesperson, said that the company has no way of knowing whether Grupo de Torres is based on the plantation, because the company has been unable to enter the property since it “was illegally seized by lawless criminals who also murdered a guard in the process in 2018.”
Residents say the Torres paramilitary group patrols the town on motorcycles, usually in the late afternoon or evening, on an almost daily basis. They come in groups of two to four motorcycles, each with two men armed with AK-47s or AR-15s and bulletproof vests. Witnesses say the armed men often saunter around town’s narrow rutted backstreets, lingering in front of the houses of people they’ve threatened to kill with their weapons brandished.
Jasmin Hristov, a sociologist who has researched paramilitarism throughout Latin America for 15 years and has conducted fieldwork in the Aguán, said the model of planting armed groups within the community constitutes part of a much larger strategy: “It’s not unique to the Aguán or Honduras,” she said. “It’s definitely a strategy that dates back to the Cold War and counterinsurgency tactics. It’s a way to gather intelligence, to divide and break the community, to create fear and terror among people. It means people can’t act together against their common enemy.”
The Grupo de Torres is responsible for killing at least eight people since 2018, residents say, though some believe it’s likely an undercount. While many of the victims are connected to the land rights movement, others had attracted the paramilitaries’ attention in different ways. Santos Anselmo Molina, a former farmer turned Dinant security guard, was ambushed and killed by three gunmen in June 2020. He had been accused by the paramilitary group of passing information about the whereabouts of the group to members of the community, said a family member who declined to be named due to safety concerns.
The specter of murder isn’t an end, residents say, but rather the most extreme tool in a larger arsenal of intimidation, which also includes firing random gunfire at community events, following people to their homes and lingering outside, and death threats. They believe that the goal of the armed group is to get rid of the cooperative and shake its partial control of the Paso Aguán plantation.
“We’re living in terrorism in this community,” said Bertulia Castro, a resident of Panamá whose house was surrounded by the squads of motorcycle gunmen twice in July. When the paramilitaries come through the village, she said, they’re so well-equipped that it’s difficult to tell them apart from soldiers.
False Positives
Santos Marcelo Torres Ruiz, the head of Grupo de Torres, was feared by land rights activists throughout the Aguán. Santos Torres had provided security for Dinant in the mid-2000s. He joined the Gregorio Chávez cooperative after its formation in 2012 and quickly became a spokesperson for the movement.
With time, however, he became alienated from many in the movement because of his authoritarian leadership tendencies.
By 2014, Santos Torres was widely rumored by residents to be in dialogue with Dinant, even as evidence emerged suggesting that guards contracted by Dinant had been killing land rights activists. (Dinant has denied involvement in the killings.) Castro, who helped harvest palm fruit as an employee for Dinant from 1999 to 2017, said that she saw the paramilitary leader show up at meetings between managers and employees on a regular basis until the end of her time there. (In 2015, at the same time that Santos Torres was rumored to be talking to Dinant, a team of investigative journalists asked the company about its involvement in violent land conflicts, and the palm oil giant produced radio clips of then-movement spokesperson Santos Torres saying that, if necessary, he would “fill the streets with blood” to retake the Paso Aguán.)
In 2018, Santos Torres announced at a public meeting in Panamá that he had nothing to do with the Gregorio Chávez movement and was withdrawing with his supporters to the back of the Paso Aguán farm, owned by Dinant. “I don’t want any of you to come through there,” he was reported to have said. Later that year, villagers began to see Santos Torres and other armed men patrolling the community.
Pineda, the Dinant spokesperson, said Santos Torres never worked directly for Dinant but may have worked for Orion, a now-defunct security company that had a contract with Dinant prior to 2014. Pineda said he met with Santos Torres in 2013, when he was a part of the Gregorio Chávez movement, but that Dinant “did not have any direct relationship with Mr. Torres at any time.”
On June 26, Santos Torres was murdered while attending a church service in Panamá. The attack was captured on video by a security camera at a house across the street. The video showed eight men with high-caliber rifles, bulletproof vests, and balaclavas approaching the facade of the small squat church building, half in military uniforms, with others clad in all black, according to someone who viewed the video several times before it was seized as evidence by the Technical Agency for Criminal Investigations (ATIC, by its Spanish acronym). Two of the armed men walked inside where, out of view of the camera, they shot Santos Torres dead.
A spokesperson for the Public Ministry, the umbrella agency that runs the special unit of the ATIC in the Aguán, declined to discuss the circumstances around the killing. The spokesperson added that the killings of both Santos Torres and Manuel Moncada were under investigation.
“The army is getting rid of the paramilitaries with the worst reputation,” said a longtime land rights activist in the Aguán who asked not to be named for security reasons. “But at the same time they are taking advantage of this to criminalize defenders and cause hatred [against them] and make actions against them. In effect, they’re doing false positives.”
After he was killed, Honduran media outlets described Santos Torres as a “campesino leader” — reflecting a well-established narrative that depicts the violence as occurring within campesino movements, rather than being directed against them by outside actors.
Criminalization Campaigns
Members of the Gregorio Chávez movement in Panamá have submitted written complaints about Grupo de Torres to the authorities for years. The reports, several copies of which were shown to The Intercept, described in detail the death threats, unsolved killings, and the armed motorcycle patrols through their village. Residents said that authorities had done little in response.
That apparent indifference changed when Santos Torres was killed.
Jaime Cabrera said he received a call from a police officer whose name he recognized in Tegucigalpa, across the country, on the night of the killing. “I hear there’s been a murder in the countryside,” the officer said. “Do you know about it?”
Cabrera, whose house is about a half a mile down the road from the church, and who said the rain made it hard to hear much outside, said he was unaware that someone had been murdered. “I didn’t even know that he’d been killed yet,” he told The Intercept. The officer hung up before explaining how he already knew about the killing.
Around mid-July, ATIC agents separately detained Daniel García and another member of the Gregorio Chávez cooperative and interrogated them about Santos Torres’s killing. (The second member asked not to be named, citing concerns for their safety.) It was an ominous sign: Operatives of the investigative unit, which was created with support from the U.S., have been accused of tampering with evidence, infiltrating social movements, and carrying out extrajudicial executions. Both said the ATIC agents offered them protection — and a visa to the U.S. or Europe — in exchange for testifying that two leaders of the Panamá cooperative, Hipólito Rivas and Jaime Cabrera, were the masterminds behind the paramilitary leader’s killing.
“I see you’re young, and I see a different life for you,” García recalls one of the agents telling him. “I can take you out of the country, I can get you money.”
The offer would be tempting to many, considering the astronomical increase of people fleeing Honduras since 2018. But the two refused to betray their friends and instead fled Honduras, undocumented, on the perilous route north to the United States.
A Perpetual Cycle
Despite the specter of paramilitary infiltration and criminalization, campesino groups in the Aguán continue organizing to retake their land.
Since April 1, farmers from the San Isidro sector of Tocoa have occupied the Los Laureles plantation, which Dinant acquired in 1992. The activists say the sale was approved by only three out of 44 members of the landowners’ collective. Dinant, which maintains that it is the rightful owner of the land, has characterized the occupation as trespassing and called on the authorities to remove the occupants. A similar, larger occupation began at the Camarones plantation in August.
The day the occupation at Los Laureles began, the Honduran police arrived in full force. But they did not disperse the crowd because the campesinos provided documents that they said evidenced their ownership of the farm, copies of which were shown to The Intercept. “They believe we are armed,” said Pedro Antonio Vindel, the president of the Laureles. “But we aren’t because we don’t need them. The weapons we have are documents. And with those documents they haven’t been able to get rid of us because they know they have no argument to do so.” (Pineda said that Dinant has not seen those documents and that the land defenders have not challenged the company’s ownership of the land in court.)
Now the plantation is surrounded by Honduran police and private security guards contracted by Dinant, who travel in joint patrols in the same trucks. Drones hover overhead at all hours of the day and follow the land defenders around the plantation, their soft, hornet-like whine audible from the ground. Multiple members of the occupation, upon leaving the rusted metal gate with their cargo of harvested African palm, have been arrested by police.
On a July evening, activist Yoni Rivas gave a speech to a crowd carrying machetes at the ramshackle store they’d set up beneath the palms. “They’re trying to find the weak among you, to pay them off, to arm them and have the campesino movement destabilized from within.”
But residents say they’ve already seen three young men going out at night and meeting with people they believe to be Dinant security guards on a regular basis. In October, five bruised and bloodied corpses, including one of a man whose hands were tied behind his back, were discovered in three communities that have been the site of land conflict, including Los Laureles and Panamá, sparking fears from land rights organizations of more violence to come.
“The conflict has already started,” said Abraham Leon, the secretary of the Los Laureles cooperative. “We’re afraid. I don’t feel safe in the cooperative anymore.” The paramilitary infiltration of Laureles, Leon said, is already beginning.
ExxonMobil's Darren Woods has been accused of lying to Congress after he denied that the company covered up its own research about oil's contribution to the climate crisis. (photo: Evan Vucci/AP)
Report into lobbying tactics names ExxonMobil and Chevron as worst, while carmaker Toyota takes third
The biggest US oil companies, as well as American Petroleum Institute, a lobby group, were found to be the worst offenders in a global report by lobbying experts at the thinktank InfluenceMap. It concluded that companies were manipulating governments to take “incredibly dangerous paths” in their approach to climate action.
Oil giants have mounted “intense resistance” to Joe Biden’s green agenda, according to the report, as the US president’s administration attempted to shift the country away from fossil fuels.
The report was published on Thursday before talks at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. It also came a week after ExxonMobil’s chief executive, Darren Woods, was accused of lying to the US Congress when he denied that the company had covered up its own research about oil’s contribution to the climate crisis.
The report said corporate lobbying tactics in part explained why regulators in some countries such as Australia have struggled to build support for more ambitious climate policy in the lead-up to Cop26 and were increasingly viewed as “a road block in global negotiations”.
Toyota was the worst-ranked carmaker and the third overall in the report, which drew from more than 50,000 of pieces of evidence, covering hundreds of the world’s most significant firms and trade groups, to analyse corporate climate lobbying activities.
The report put Toyota among some of the worst polluting companies in the world because of its opposition to phase out deadlines for fossil fuel and hybrid vehicles.
Ed Collins, a director at InfluenceMap, said it was clear that the transition to a clean energy future would remain extremely challenging until governments took meaningful action to tackle “the obstructive and anti-science lobbying of vested interests from fossil fuel value chain sectors”.
“The corporate playbook for holding back climate policy has come a long way from science denialism but it is every bit as damaging,” he said. “What we are seeing is not limited to efforts to undermine regulations directly. It also involves prolific and highly sophisticated narrative capture techniques, leading governments down incredibly dangerous paths.”
The thinktank’s report noted a strong shift among many fossil fuels companies towards pro-gas lobbying and away from coal. This includes lobbying from BP, which was ninth on the global list, the Austrian energy company OMV, which was 10th, and the Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom, which was 17th.
A spokesperson for Exxon said: “There are competing views about how best to address the risks of climate change. ExxonMobil supports certain climate policies and opposes others. But it would be a mistake to equate such policy disagreements with promotion of climate ‘disinformation.’”
Chevron and Toyota were also contacted for comment.
From the 1987 album, Solitude Standing. (photo: Paula Bullwinkel)
Sunday Song: Suzanne Vega | Luka
Suzanne Vega, YouTube
Excerpt: "I guess I'd like to be alone. With nothing broken, nothing thrown."
Lyrics Suzanne Vega, Luka.
Written by, Suzanne Vega
From the 1987 album, Solitude Standing.
My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes, I think you've seen me before
If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight
Just don't ask me what it was
Just don't ask me what it was
Just don't ask me what it was
I think it's 'cause I'm clumsy
I try not to talk too loud
Maybe it's because I'm crazy
I try not to act too proud
They only hit until you cry
After that you don't ask why
You just don't argue anymore
Just don't argue anymore
Just don't argue anymore
Yes, I think I'm okay
Walked into the door again
If you ask that's what I'll say
It's not your business anyway
I guess I'd like to be alone
With nothing broken, nothing thrown
Just don't ask me how I am
Just don't ask me how I am
Just don't ask me how I am
My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes, I think you've seen me before
If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble, some kind of fight
Just don't ask me what it was
Just don't ask me what it was
Just don't ask me what it was
They only hit until you cry
After that you don't ask why
You just don't argue anymore
Just don't argue anymore
Just don't argue anymore
The Indigenous community of Catoteni, in Atalaya province in Ucayali, has tried to resist the threat of illegal activity. (photo: Christian Ugarte/Mongabay)
In the Loreto region alone, there are 417 self-identified Indigenous communities that do not have the recognition of regional authorities to certify their existence. The same issue exists in other Peruvian regions, too: Ucayali has 122, Pasco has 85, Huánuco has 13, and Madre de Dios has 10 communities that are not officially recognized. This makes a total of 647 unrecognized Indigenous communities in five regions of the Peruvian Amazon.
However, these communities’ main problem is not just their lack of government recognition. When the more than 2,000 Indigenous communities in Peru — the recognized, unrecognized, and those in the process of recognition — are marked on a map, they often overlap with areas affected within the past 10 years by deforestation, illegal mining, and illicit coca crops.
Mongabay Latam conducted an analysis on the impact of environmental crimes on Indigenous territories. In these five Amazonian regions, the analysis found that at least 1,247 Indigenous communities are affected by illegal mining, illicit crops, or deforestation.
Recent photography shows the communities surrounded by illegal mines that pollute their rivers with mercury; by invading loggers targeting rainforest timber; and by violent drug traffickers. Of the 54 clandestine airstrips detected by the Ucayali regional government, typically associated with traffickers, 15 are within Indigenous territories. Seven of the 10 environmental defenders murdered in the last year and a half are Indigenous Amazonian leaders. All seven were shot dead in incidents that their communities have linked to invaders and drug traffickers.
Six months ago, a team of journalists from Mongabay Latam began compiling information from civil society organizations and from the government to analyze the incidence of environmental crimes in Indigenous communities. The team analyzed data on the legal ownership of Indigenous lands, the advance of deforestation, and the locations of coca crops and illegal mining camps in the regions of Huánuco, Ucayali, Loreto, Pasco, and Madre de Dios. The Mongabay Latam team then visited the communities where the data suggested the situation was most dire.
‘Ghost’ communities
The first challenge that Indigenous communities in Peru face is having to “certify” their own existence. Their vulnerability lies in the government’s difficulty in recognizing, titling, and registering them in official records. Public entities often show different data in terms of the number of recognized communities. “It is impossible to arrive at an exact figure,” said Katherine Sánchez, a legal specialist at the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law.
Unrecognized communities have less legal security. “Communal property, when it is not recognized, has limitations for managing projects and social programs, including public services such as health care centers,” said Nelly Aedo, director of the Indigenous communities program at the Ombudsman’s Office.
This lack of protection is reflected in the name these communities receive in the Ministry of Culture’s database: “Locality without type identified by the DRA [Regional Directorate of Agriculture],” almost as if they’re “ghost” communities. The recognition of a native community is the first step to obtaining legal security — that is, to getting a title for the communal territory.
“If you are born Indigenous, you automatically have a right to the collective territory and to recognition as Indigenous people. As a consequence, what pertains to the government is to recognize that right,” said Ernesto Ráez, executive director of the Common Good Institute (IBC, or Instituto del Bien Común in Spanish). For more than 20 years, IBC has worked with Indigenous communities in land use planning and environmental conservation.
Manco Cápac is one of the more than 647 communities in the regions of Ucayali, Loreto, Huánuco, Pasco, and Madre de Dios that are awaiting recognition and the right to officially titled territory.
“There are several communities to recognize. Five or 10 years ago, the communities on the banks of the Amazon River said that they were campesino communities, and only with time have they been identifying as Indigenous communities,” said Manuel Ramírez, the president of the Indigenous People’s Regional Organization of the Eastern Amazon (ORPIO).
This was an issue of discrimination, Ramírez said, because they felt they would have more rights as a campesino community, but only later realized that this wasn’t the case. “Now they are recognized, but they are not all part of a federation; if you are not in a federation, you do not have the benefits of the titling projects,” Ramírez said.
In Mongabay Latam’s database, which holds information from official institutions and civil society organizations in Spanish, 1,140 communities in the five regions are listed as titled. The majority of these titled communities, 742, are in Loreto. The rest are in Ucayali (255), Pasco (105), Madre de Dios (27), and Huánuco (11).
Deforestation, drug trafficking, and violence
In April 2020, soon after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of Arbildo Meléndez marked the beginning of the violence that would erupt in the coming months. Meléndez was the president of the Indigenous community of Unipacuyacu, made up of members of the Kakataibo ethnic group in Huánuco.
Four Kakataibo leaders and three Ashaninka leaders have been murdered so far this year. Kakataibo lands, in both the Ucayali and Huánuco regions, have become the most critical areas in terms of the presence of illegal activities, especially drug trafficking.
Between 2017 and 2019, five Indigenous communities in Huánuco — Santa Martha, Nuevo Unidos Tahuantinsuyo, Unipacuyacu, Tsirotzire, and Santa Teresa — lost 16,052 hectares (39,665 acres) to deforestation.
Mongabay Latam journalists were able to enter Unipacuyacu very briefly. They saw the devastation in the area and used a drone to capture images of what is believed to be a clandestine airstrip. Inhabitants of the community say they live in fear.
Indigenous communities across Ucayali face a similar scenario. According to the analysis, there are at least 16 Indigenous communities under the threat of deforestation caused by drug trafficking. Between 2017 and 2019, 35,525 hectares (87,784 acres) have been affected.
Data from 2020 may paint an even direr scene, as Peru lost more forest area last year than in the past 20 years. “It is scandalous,” IBC’s Ráez said of the increased deforestation in Peru, which exceeded the 2019 rate by 50,000 hectares (nearly 124,000 acres). “If we abandon the monitoring of the Amazonian biome, then the defenders of those forests, who are from Indigenous communities, are left unprotected,” Ráez said.
“During the pandemic, illegality has increased a lot, because while we were obedient and did not go anywhere, the criminals continued to advance,” said Berlin Diques, president of the Ucayali branch of the Interethnic Association for the Development of the Peruvian Rainforest (AIDESEP).
The Ministry of Environment, in a written response to Mongabay Latam’s inquiries, said that “the regions where the greatest increase in deforestation has been identified during 2020 have been Ucayali, Loreto, and Madre de Dios, compared to 2019. The drivers have been diverse. For example, in Ucayali, an increase in coca crops has been identified in some provinces, such as in Coronel Portillo.”
The ministry also confirmed that “the Indigenous communities have perhaps been the most affected by deforestation problems in 2020. They have been more exposed and more vulnerable to several informal and illegal agents who — because of the retraction of control mechanisms due to the COVID-19 pandemic — have taken advantage of this situation.”
Community resistance
The analysis of the deforestation in the five Peruvian regions showed that around 276,000 hectares (about 682,000 acres) of forest were lost within Indigenous territories in the last 10 years.
In Ucayali alone, 344 Indigenous communities have lost 104,000 hectares (about 257,000 acres) of forest in the last 10 years. Authorities from Ucayali’s regional government have also detected 54 clandestine airstrips in the region. Thirteen are in Indigenous communities and two are in Indigenous reserves.
Atalaya is home to the largest number of Indigenous communities in Ucayali, around 300, and is the most affected by forest loss in the region. Many communities in Atalaya serve as buffers for protected areas like El Sira Communal Reserve.
“Communal property, when it is not recognized, has limitations for managing projects and social programs, including public services such as healthcare centers.”
Nelly Aedo
Director of the Indigenous communities program at the Ombudsman’s Office
The stories of resistance are visible on Mongabay Latam’s visualization map. Indigenous territories surrounded by deforestation appear, and many of their residents have organized to defend their land. But these acts of resistance have become increasingly dangerous for them.
The threat of illegal mining
In other regions, like Madre de Dios, it’s possible to see the effects of another serious environmental crime: illegal mining. Reporters from Mongabay Latam traveled through San José de Karene, a community in Madre de Dios which does have an official title, and where the impact of illegal mining was evident. According to the analysis, illegal mining has stolen 6,282 hectares (15,523 acres) of forest from the community.
“Today, customs are no longer practiced,” said Francis Quique, a member of the San José de Karene governing board. “Even parents themselves do not handle this knowledge, and this is being lost due to mining.
“If we lose our customs,” he added, “then it would not even make sense to call ourselves an Indigenous community.”
According to the analysis by Mongabay Latam, despite all the efforts by the communities to tackle the issue, illegal mining has impacted 129 communities in the five regions in the study.
Of the five regions in the study, Madre de Dios experienced the largest percentage of land lost to illegal mining, with a total of 47,096 hectares (116,377 acres) between 2013 and 2020.
Loreto is the region with the greatest number of communities affected by illegal mining: 84 in total. The affected land spans 278,958 hectares (689,320 acres) belonging to Indigenous communities.
These communities also must grapple with the lack of georeferencing and clearly defined boundaries for their territories. This allows outsiders to invade and later legalize the occupied territory. This has been the case in Catoteni and San José de Karene.
“If you are born Indigenous, you automatically have a right to the collective territory and to recognition as Indigenous people. As a consequence, what pertains to the government is to recognize that right,”
Ernesto Ráez
Executive director of the Common Good Institute
Sánchez, from the Peruvian Society for Environmental Law, said that “georeferencing reliably determines the limits of a community” and that having this information requires “a specific procedure just as demanding as titling. However, it is necessary to execute it to avoid overlapping and border conflicts.”
“What would correspond would be to grant large territories to the communities. But we have communities that are absurdly small, that cannot be sustained economically, and that have been condemned in this way to poverty, human misery, and environmental degradation,” said IBC’s Ráez.
Mongabay Latam requested an interview with the Ministry of Culture to ask about the process of titling these Indigenous communities and about their vulnerability to illegal activities. The ministry declined an interview and said the issues fell outside of its purview. Mongabay Latam then contacted the Ministry of Agricultural Development and Irrigation, the entity responsible for titling rural lands, but this ministry also declined an interview.
Obstacles and opportunities
Since 2013, the Ministry of Agricultural Development and Irrigation has overseen some legal matters for the land in rural and Indigenous communities, according to a report by the Ombudsman’s Office. However, some administrative procedures are handled by the regional governments.
In June 2021, an addendum was signed for a joint declaration between Peru, Norway, and Germany that seeks to reduce greenhouse gases from the deforestation and degradation of forests in the Amazon. The declaration’s goal is the legalization of at least 5 million hectares (more than 12 million acres) of Indigenous land, a process that includes demarcating the territories and granting property titles. Titling land is a first step for communities to be able to access the REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation) mechanism, which may allow Indigenous communities to access funds to help keep their forests standing.
However, the data from Mongabay Latam’s analysis paint a grim picture. Without clear protective measures from the government, the outlook for the Indigenous communities in the Amazon is increasingly complicated.
This artile was originally published on Mongabay.
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