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Showing posts with label Berta Cáceres. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Berta Cáceres. Show all posts

Thursday, August 26, 2021

RSN: Bess Levin | Trump Is Finally Telling His Supporters to Get Vaccinated, but It's Probably Too Late - and It's All His Fault

 


 

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26 August 21

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A protester holds an anti-vaccination sign as supporters of President Donald Trump rally on May 16, 2020 in Woodland Hills, California. (photo: Getty)
Bess Levin | Trump Is Finally Telling His Supporters to Get Vaccinated, but It's Probably Too Late - and It's All His Fault
Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
Levin writes: "One of the most disturbing aspects of the rise of Donald Trump is the extent to which his followers came to believe that this carnival-barking, semi-literate, faux-successful businessman with five children by three women, zero relevant experience, and a reputation for f--king people over and being completely full of shit was (and remains) their lord and savior."

Most of these people are lost causes, and we know exactly whom to blame.


ne of the most disturbing aspects of the rise of Donald Trump is the extent to which his followers came to believe that this carnival-barking, semi-literatefaux-successful businessman with five children by three women, zero relevant experience, and a reputation for f--king people over and being completely full of shit was (and remains) their lord and savior. Despite repeated evidence that they shouldn’t believe a single thing he says, Trump’s supporters have made it clear that they’re more than happy to buy whatever this bloated Jim Jones is selling. (If that comparison seems extreme to you, know that a person who was literally at the Jonestown massacre thinks it’s apt.) So it would stand to reason that if Trump had wholeheartedly endorsed getting vaccinated against COVID-19, members of his base would have been trampling one another to get a shot the moment they were available, as if the jabs were deeply discounted 62-inch flat-screen TVs on Black Friday.

Of course Trump chose not to do that. Instead, he got his vaccine in secret, and since leaving office in January has refused to do anything more than say during random interviews that he “would recommend” getting inoculated before quickly changing the subject; earlier this month, the Daily Beast reported that “despite pleas from multiple friends and advisers,” he’s repeatedly rebuffed the idea of mounting “anything resembling a real effort to get his supporters vaccinated,” as it would be helping Joe Biden. All of which has unsurprisingly led to huge swaths of Republicans choosing not to get a lifesaving vaccine and outlets like Fox News peddling all manner of misinformation about vaccines, like that they aren’t actually necessary and are in fact liberal plots.

At some point over the weekend, though, someone must have drilled it into Trump’s head that things are really, really bad out there: The delta variant is absolutely ripping through unvaccinated communities and leaving numerous parts of Trump Country with nary an ICU bed, and “deathbed vaccine regrets” are now a thing. Because at a rally on Saturday, he did something crazy—he actually came out, in public, and told his supporters to get their shots. And then something perhaps even crazier happened, given how these people feel about him (which, as previously mentioned, is that he’s basically Jesus Christ, if Jesus Christ were one of the worst people on earth): They booed him.

Per USA Today:

Former president Donald Trump was briefly booed at a rally on Saturday in Alabama after telling his supporters they should get vaccinated against COVID-19. Trump, who held a rally in Cullman, about 50 miles north of Birmingham, touted to rallygoers that the three vaccines—Pfizer, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson—were developed in under nine months during his presidency. He then suggested that they get the vaccine.

“You know what? I believe totally in your freedoms. You got to do what you have to do, but I recommend: Take the vaccines. I did it—it’s good,” he said.

You can hear it here for posterity:

Obviously if we weren’t literally talking about life and death here, seeing Trump get booed by the monster of his own making would be a real delight. But since we are, it’s actually pretty terrifying. If he can’t convince his followers to get their shots, what hope do we have left?

As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake put it:

It was a sight to behold: Trump being booed at a rally by his own supporters. A look at the archives suggests that’s largely unprecedented, save for when Trump praised Tom Brady at a 2016 rally in Maryland. To be clear, this was a small portion of the contingent at the rally. It was also in Alabama, which is one of the most vaccine-resistant states in the country (current vaccination rate ranking: 50th out of 50 states). We often oversell the importance of the loud and passionate few in these settings. But this was still Trump getting heckled by his own supporters, which hasn’t really happened for a reason. Trump’s base has generally been all about the man, and less about the policies and details. But here, they didn’t like the actual details.

It was also merely the latest evidence that the monster that has been created, however much culpability there is for Trump personally, won’t go away quietly.

Trump never could have purged his party of all of its vaccine skepticism, but there is plenty of evidence he could have made a significant difference—if for no other reason than it might have sent a cue to some allies who have filled the vacuum by pushing dubious claims about vaccines.

Take, for instance, the reaction from Fox News after the FDA gave Pfizer’s COVID vaccine full approval:

Or the fact that, according to a report released by Facebook over the weekend, the most popular link on its platform from January to March of this year was “an article raising concerns that the coronavirus vaccine could lead to death.”

In other words, even if Trump has decided to start throwing his weight behind vaccinations, it may be too late. On the very same night he told his supporters to get their shots, he of course also told the ones booing: “That’s alright. You got your freedoms. But I happen to take the vaccine. If it doesn’t work, you’ll be the first to know. I’ll call up Alabama. I’ll say, ‘Hey, you know what?’ But it is working. But you do have your freedoms.”

So yeah, for numerous reasons, f--k that guy.

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Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa.; Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., center; Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.; and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., talk in front of the U.S. Capitol on July 30, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty)
Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa.; Rep. Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., center; Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va.; and Rep. Fred Upton, R-Mich., talk in front of the U.S. Capitol on July 30, 2021, in Washington, D.C. (photo: Kent Nishimura/Getty)


Jonathan Chait | Gottheimer's Suicide Squad Hurt Their Party but Gained Nothing
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
Chait writes: "Until 11 days ago, the Democratic Party had a unified strategy to advance President Biden's legislative agenda. The plan was to pass two bills: a bipartisan infrastructure deal favored by the moderates and a partisan social-welfare bill favored by progressives."

ntil 11 days ago, the Democratic Party had a unified strategy to advance President Biden’s legislative agenda. The plan was to pass two bills: a bipartisan infrastructure deal favored by the moderates and a partisan social-welfare bill favored by progressives. The moderates couldn’t get their bipartisan bill without the progressives, and the progressives couldn’t get their partisan bill without the moderates.

Nine House Democrats blew up the deal. After refusing to support the House budget vote, they extracted a promise to vote for the infrastructure bill by the end of September. But the upshot is the same as ever: Both factions need to cooperate with each other to get their bills. Either both will pass, or neither will.

The nine rebels, led by Josh Gottheimer, claimed their intention was merely to make sure the bipartisan bill didn’t perish, on the pretext that a ten-year infrastructure plan had to be passed right away in order to get shovels into the ground.

A number of reporters and commentators have taken Gottheimer’s reasoning at face value. But Gottheimer’s motive had very little to do with the infrastructure bill. What he wanted was to gain leverage over the other bill. If infrastructure passed the House first, he and other moderates would be able to negotiate from a position of one-sided strength, or walk away from the table entirely, on the reconciliation bill that will form the basis of Biden’s domestic legacy.

The Gottheimer 9 didn’t get the promise to vote on the infrastructure bill before voting on the rule. They only got a promise to vote on it by September 27. Importantly, while they have a promise to bring the bill to the floor, they have no assurance the infrastructure bill will pass. Unless large numbers of Republicans vote for it — a prospect that currently appears unlikely — the infrastructure bill will still need overwhelming support from the Democratic caucus. And getting that means making a deal with the liberals on the reconciliation bill. The negotiating dynamics haven’t changed.

September 27 can serve as a deadline for Democrats to make some kind of internal agreement on the reconciliation bill. Moderate Democrats in the Senate have already said they won’t support the full $3.5-trillion-over-ten-year spending plan passed by the Senate Budget Committee. What they need to do over the next five weeks is settle on a number acceptable across the party. If they don’t, liberals in the House can probably vote down the bipartisan bill, knowing they can always turn around and approve it later once a deal is in hand.

What does seem to have changed is the disposition of the rest of the party toward the Gottheimer 9. The spectacle of a tiny faction throwing the party into disarray and breaking an informal understanding that their margins were too narrow to permit individual members to make extravagant personal demands seems to have generated enormous resentment. Politico reports that House Democrats vented their anger at the Gottheimer 9 at a caucus meeting. Democrats from Trump-leaning districts have either abstained from joining Gottheimer, or — like Representative Susan Wild — openly pleaded with them to back down.

The primary success of Gottheimer’s rebellion has been to seize for himself and his band the coveted “moderate” label. News reporters who had once used the “moderate” description for a different, larger faction of Democrats from purple districts now apply it to Gottheimer and his allies — the majority of whom come from safe Democratic seats. Whatever concerns they harbor about the reconciliation bill — specifically its higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals — it’s not reelection.

Indeed, not only do most of the House Democrats who used to be identified as moderate still support the Biden-Pelosi strategy of negotiating the two bills in tandem, so do Third Way and the New Democrat Coalition, the main institutions associated with the party’s center.

Gottheimer’s plan was always unlikely: He wanted to extort the vast majority of his party into surrendering its negotiating leverage to him, but his plan required them to cooperate by voting for the bill he wanted to pass, on his schedule. What he succeeded in doing was gumming up the works in Congress, increasing the perception that Biden’s party couldn’t govern, and cementing a media narrative that benefited him personally at the expense of Democrats most in danger of losing their seats.

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A Proud Boys rally descended into violence on Sunday in Portland, Oregon. (photo: Mattieu lewis-Rolland/Getty)
A Proud Boys rally descended into violence on Sunday in Portland, Oregon. (photo: Mattieu lewis-Rolland/Getty)


Portland Gunfight Fuels Alarm Over Growing Use of Weapons at Rallies
Jason Wilson, Guardian UK
Wilson writes: "A gunfight in Portland, Oregon, last week is intensifying concerns over escalating violence during contentious rallies in the city, as far-right demonstrators and anti-fascist counter-protesters have repeatedly faced off."

Far-right Proud Boys regularly carry handguns and other groups have adopted less lethal weapons

The Portland police bureau charged a 65-year-old man from Gresham, Oregon, over a gunfight in the city’s downtown during violent clashes on Sunday. Authorities say Dennis Anderson drew a concealed handgun and shot at a group of anti-fascists who were trying to expel him from the area. At least one of the anti-fascists shot back, according to authorities, with seven shots exchanged between the two sides.

Proud Boys and members of other far-right groups regularly open-carry handguns during protest, and the shootout fueled the growing concern about the presence of firearms at rallies taking place across the US.

But other violent incidents in Portland on Sunday showed how participants have also increasingly adopted less lethal, but still dangerous, technologies as weapons for political street fighting.

On Sunday afternoon, about 200 Proud Boys and members of other far-right groups clashed with a smaller group of anti-fascists near an abandoned Kmart in the city’s outer north-east. The confrontation became a running street battle, with participants fist-fighting and attacking each other with pepper spray.

The two camps also resorted to other tactics they had deployed during previous demonstrations. Anti-fascists threw fireworks, repeating a tactic that some leftwing protesters have long used in contentious events in Portland and beyond. Similar munitions were used in several confrontations with police during Portland’s long string of protests last summer, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

At one point on Sunday, a firework thrown by an anti-fascist exploded in the forecourt of a gas station, raising alarm on all sides of the confrontation.

Some Proud Boys, on the other hand, were carrying airsoft guns, replica firearms that fire pellets with compressed air and are usually used in recreational combat games or combat training.

Those weapons, along with paintball guns, first made an appearance during clashes in August 2020, when a group of far-right brawlers used them to shoot gas-propelled pellets at a far larger group of leftwing protesters. A Guardian investigation at the time showed that participants had planned for weeks to employ the devices in a way that maximized their destructive impact.

Since then, the weapons have been used at every Portland protest where far-right groups have showed up, including on 29 August 2020, when passengers in vehicles participating in a pro-Donald Trump truck convoy shot pedestrians with the devices.

Hours after those vehicle attacks, Jay Danielson, a supporter of Patriot Prayer, a far-right street protest group that made high-profile incursions into Portland throughout the Trump era, was shot dead by a self-identified anti-fascist, Michael Reinoehl. Reinoehl himself was later shot dead by police in Lacey, Washington.

Although airsoft and paintball guns are unlikely to kill, medical researchers say that they pose a significant risk of injury to eyes, heads, and other extremities. There were an estimated 10,080 emergency room visits attributable to non-powder guns including airsoft and paintball guns across the US last year, according to data from the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System.

The use of airsoft and paintball guns, just like any weapon, can be prosecuted when they are used to threaten others. Earlier this month, a Portland resident was arrested for pointing an airsoft weapon at a journalist, under a statute that penalises the misuse of “dangerous or deadly weapons”. But they are not subject to any specific federal or state laws, and nor are they covered by firearms laws.

The weapons’ legal status, as well as their non-lethality, have made them an attractive option for extremist groups in and outside of the US, said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s program on extremism.

Lewis argued that the Proud Boys were likely to continue to use the weapons in Portland and anywhere where there was a “lax local response” to the group’s activities from law enforcement.

On Sunday, the absence of police during the confrontations raised questions about whether authorities in the city were willing, or able, to stop the violence.

The Portland police bureau (PPB) chief, Chuck Lovell, announced in repeated statements in advance of the unpermitted rally that protesters “should not expect to see police officers standing in the middle of the crowd trying to keep people apart”.

The tactic gave rally-goers and counter-protesters free rein, while employees of businesses located near the fracas told local media that they felt abandoned by law enforcement.

New data on firearms at demonstrations

The concerns over the events in Portland come as a new report by two national non-profits, the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (Acled) and Everytown for Gun Safety, showed that over the last year and a half, “armed demonstrations”, at which individuals other than law enforcement officers were carrying firearms, were nearly six times as likely to turn violent or destructive compared with unarmed demonstrations.

Researchers did not determine whether the presence of firearms provoked violent acts, or if participants tended to arm themselves ahead of events that were likely to be violent, said Dr Roudabeh Kishi, a researcher for Acled.

But while “it can be hard to tell the chicken from the egg”, she added, guns “may heighten tensions and intimidate protesters who aren’t accustomed to seeing them”.

Additional data from Acled highlighted the scale of violent protests in Portland.

Between 1 January 2020 and 30 July 2021, Portland saw 128 demonstrations that were violent and/or destructive, amounting to 31% of the total number of demonstrations in the city in that period. This was more than 10 times higher than the national average of 3% of demonstrations becoming violent or destructive.

In the same time period, Portland saw 21 armed demonstrations – about 4% of all armed demonstrations across the country in that time. Fourteen of those – or 67% – turned violent or destructive in that period, whereas only 16% of armed demonstrations did in the country as a whole.

Kishi cautioned that it was “important to consider the context in Portland”, adding that an “aggressive, militarized response to the demonstrations” last summer helped push “some peaceful protests into violent or destructive riots”.

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Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Getty)
Sen. Joe Manchin. (photo: Getty)


Joe Manchin Faces Protests From the Left at Home in West Virginia
Philip Elliot, TIME
Elliot writes: "Manchin represents one of the poorest-and whitest-states in the country. West Virginia was second only to Wyoming in its support for Donald Trump last year."

n many ways, politics is a theater for policy discussions, told through varied layers of symbolism and stage management. Politicians signal meaning in the colors they choose to wear, the towns they visit and the venues they appear in. On the outside, activists stage elaborate performance art, like handing out flip-flops to shame candidates who switched positions, or flying prop-planes with slogans dragging behind on banners.

The moves don’t have to be terribly subtle to have a desired effect. There certainly won’t be any level of subtlety at political events in Charleston, W.Va., tomorrow. Organizers say it’s too late to chase any degree of nuance as they build a case against West Virginia’s notoriously apolitical politician, moderate Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin.

“We really have a crisis in the character of the nation right now. On the one hand, you’ve got Republicans who seem to never see anything that will lift the masses of the people that they like. They are committed to a retrogressive public policy. They believe in treating corporations like people,” says the Rev. William J. Barber II, a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for a Moral Revival, which positions itself as an heir to the civil rights movement’s activism and has been merciless to Manchin. “On the other hand, you’ve got so-called moderate and centrist Democrats, who did not swear to uphold the moderate or the centrist Constitution. They swore to uphold the Constitution. Somehow or another, when they get in… they follow the lead of the Chamber of Commerce rather than the Constitution.”

Manchin represents one of the poorest—and whitest—states in the country. West Virginia was second only to Wyoming in its support for Donald Trump last year. Manchin initially refused to back Democrats’ aggressive voting-rights bills and later appeared at a Texas fundraiser with Republicans trying to roll them back in that state. He is no fan of Democrats’ big-ticket infrastructure plans and won’t scrap the filibuster to do other legacy-defining ideas. And he was one of eight Democrats to vote against upping the minimum wage to $15-an-hour as part of a Democratic-only COVID-19 relief bill. In a 50-50 Senate that tilts to Democrats only when Vice President Kamala Harris breaks a tie, Manchin effectively has veto power.

Which is why Barber, after meeting today with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is heading to West Virginia to pressure Manchin. When Barber last showed up with activists in the state in June, Manchin changed his tune on voting rights. Now, Barber tells TIME, he wants Manchin to keep evolving on voting rights, the filibuster, a minimum-wage hike and workers’ rights. It’s an ambitious agenda, for sure, but one that can trace its roots back to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.

The plan is for 151 cars—or more—to motorcade to Manchin’s office in Charleston to celebrate the 151st anniversary of the 15th Amendment, which effectively gave Black men the right to vote. And, once there, they’ll demand a $15-an-hour minimum wage. The launching point for this parade? The site of the Battle of Blair Mountain—the 1921 labor fight that was the largest armed uprising since the Civil War, during which the feds turned their guns on workers to keep them from demanding rights. The lead-off car for this week’s march will be a hearse, carrying what organizers say will be a symbolic representation of Manchin’s backbone.

Chekhov, this isn’t. But for organizers, the time for polite petitions and subtle symbolism is over.

“We know in West Virginia, we are bright red. And for years we have kind of overlooked some of the things that Manchin’s done because we know he’s trying to appease both sides of the party,” says Pamela Garrison, a 61-year-old self-described “professional cashier” who has worked her whole life for minimum wage and plans to participate tomorrow. “Sen. Manchin, how can one man have that much power and not use it for good? We’ve overlooked it for years, but it’s down to where these [issues] are too important… to be on the fence. So we want to know: Which side are you on? On the side of the people? Or are you on the side of the corporations?”

(These same organizers have a beef with the other most moderate Democrat in the Senate, Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, and have heckled her, too.)

If all of this feels like a lot, well, it is. But it’s not without precedent.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. led the famous March on Washington in 1963, it wasn’t solely about civil rights. In fact, one of the march’s platform planks was a $2-an-hour minimum wage. You guessed it: that would be about $18 these days, adjusted for inflation.

The 15th Amendment in 1870 was the last of the Reconstruction-era changes to the Constitution designed to make it illegal for state and federal officials to deny Americans the right to vote based on race, color or previous state of slavery. More than a century later, Americans are still fighting for these rights as voting rights come under fire and Congress just this week started work on yet another outline to countermand state-level efforts to restrict voting in places like Georgia and Texas.

Finally, the staging ground at Blair Mountain sets the stage for a worker-rights debate that, especially in the poorest corners of this country, speaks to the rampant unfair conditions facing Americans. The same streak of populism that helped Trump win the White House is alive and well on the left in West Virginia, where folks like Garrison have had enough. It’s why she was with the protest in June and she’ll be at the front tomorrow.

“He heard us because we were in his face,” she says. “We’re not here being courteous. We’re here demanding, before it’s too late. I’m here for my kids, my grandkids, because I don’t want a democracy only in name. I don’t want to be Russia.”

A spokeswoman for Manchin said the Senator is always listening to his constituents. “Sen. Manchin appreciates The Poor People’s Campaign advocacy efforts, which is why he met with the group several months ago,” the spokeswoman said. “He continues to listen to the concerns West Virginians share and seek solutions to the issues facing our state.”

Still, the pressure is mounting on Manchin, a smart politician who, as this newsletter has noted many times before, may be the last Democrat capable of winning statewide in West Virginia for some time. But he also knows how to win. Which is why activists are keenly aware of this fact: in 2020, just 3% of voters in West Virginia identified as Black—the exact margin of Manchin’s victory in 2018. In other words, the few Black voters in the state could decide whether Manchin keeps his job after he is expected to next face voters in 2024. Symbols don’t cast ballots, but they carry tremendous power in determining who might choose to do so.

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Abigail Echo-Hawk, a researcher and advocate, center left, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, center right, are among the Indigenous women pushing for more resources for murder investigations. (photo: Chelsea Stahl/NBC News)
Abigail Echo-Hawk, a researcher and advocate, center left, and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, center right, are among the Indigenous women pushing for more resources for murder investigations. (photo: Chelsea Stahl/NBC News)


No One Knows How Many Indigenous Women Are Murdered Each Year. That Makes the Deaths Hard to Stop.
Graham Lee Brewer, NBC News
Brewer writes: "Three years later, there is still no definitive count of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S., in part because of underreporting of crimes and police reports that misclassify Native American women as white or Hispanic."

Indigenous women are demanding a reshaping of the criminal justice system in a way that values their lives.

bigail Echo-Hawk was part of a small team of researchers at the Seattle Indian Health Board that released a landmark study in 2018 on the number of missing and murdered Indigenous women. The report not only hinted at the hidden magnitude of the problem — documenting more than 500 cases, predominantly in the Western United States, stretching back to the 1940s — it also highlighted major shortcomings in the crime data used to understand the issue.

In the absence of comprehensive government information, Echo-Hawk and her colleagues combed media reports, reached out to the families of victims across Indian Country and called community leaders and organizers to compile their study.

“ We need to understand the base issue of the problem,” said Echo-Hawk, the executive vice president the Seattle Indian Health Board and a citizen of the Pawnee Nation. “Where are we? What does the data look like? What do the leaders need?”

Three years later, there is still no definitive count of missing and murdered Indigenous women in the U.S., in part because of underreporting of crimes and police reports that misclassify Native American women as white or Hispanic. Police generally do not document victims’ tribal affiliation — often, police forms lack a field for this information — which means even tribal governments don’t understand the scope of the problem among their own citizens. But based on available research, more than 4 out of 5 American Indian and Alaska Native women experience violence in their lifetime, according to a 2016 National Institute of Justice study.

Without better data, this ongoing legacy of colonial violence, in which Indigenous women and children across North America were subjugated and exploited for hundreds of years, has been effectively hidden. Native people have been made invisible in the data policymakers use to address the public’s needs and allocate the necessary funding and attention, researchers and advocates say.

Echo-Hawk is one of many Indigenous women demanding a reshaping of the criminal justice system in a way that values their lives. She and others are pushing the issue to the forefront by pressuring public officials and policymakers to fund efforts to address the problem and by showing them, through testimonials and research, the cost of inaction.

“We refuse to let our people die in silence,” Echo-Hawk said.

In the last few years, nearly a dozen states have created task forces on the issue, and Echo-Hawk and other Indigenous researchers and advocates are pushing more states to do the same — and to fund the changes the panels recommend. In Minnesota, Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, a Democrat who is White Earth Band of Ojibwe, has pushed for funding for justice reforms. The task force there led to the recent establishment of an office to investigate cold cases, using Covid-19 relief funding.

This month, Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson, a Democrat, announced his state would create a task force as well. The 21-member group of representatives from tribal nations, community outreach organizations and the criminal justice system will look at best practices for data collection and crime reporting. The task force has $500,000 to spend over the next two years and hired a small staff.

“The incomplete nature of the data, if I’m putting it charitably, has been a challenge for us,” Ferguson said.

Addressing the patchwork of criminal jurisdictions in Indian Country — which requires prosecutors, and sometimes law enforcement, to determine whether tribes, the state or the federal government has authority in a case — is already difficult, he said. But it’s an even more daunting task when law enforcement doesn't know how many cases exist.

One of Echo-Hawk’s strategies is a novel workaround: Since law enforcement generally does not collect data on tribal affiliation, this year she helped the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, which covers Seattle, set up a system to gather this information from victims and their family members when a case is referred for prosecution. The office also created a system to share resources and information with tribes.

Aubony Burns, a senior deputy prosecuting attorney in King County, said she and her co-workers found the Seattle Indian Health Board’s report “startling,” and after an inventory of their cases, she said they realized “we had huge holes in just the basics of our data.”

For Burns, a citizen of the Choctaw Nation who works in the office’s sexually violent predator unit, it was an urgent call to action to collect better crime data, which determines the prosecutions that get resources and attention. “If we’re not keeping it right and addressing it in the correct way, then it’s really useless, right?” she said.

The program is new, but Burns said in the coming months she expects data on tribal affiliation to illuminate the needs of the Indigenous peoples in King County.

Since the 2018 study, both the Seattle Police Department and the Washington State Patrol have put funding toward cases involving missing or murdered Indigenous people, but neither has started gathering tribally specific data. The Seattle Police Department has worked with the Seattle Indian Health Board to analyze the data collection process and hired a data adviser on this issue, said Sgt. Randall Huserik. The Washington State Patrol has hired two tribal liaisons to review data for racial misclassifications, help families report crimes and investigate older cases, said Capt. Neil Weaver.

Echo-Hawk secured a grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to start the work being done in King County, which she hopes to see replicated outside of Washington. Next month she and her colleagues will share that work in a toolkit for other prosecutors interested in collecting and analyzing tribally specific victim data.

“It is true, community-led police reform,” Echo-Hawk said. "What we’ve done in the King County prosecutor’s office can be replicated in any county in the country, large or small."

There’s also action at the federal level. Under the direction of Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold the position, the department is building a missing and murdered unit within the Bureau of Indian Affairs to support investigations and coordinate services with the families of victims.

For Annie Forsman-Adams, a researcher on Washington’s new task force and a member of the Suquamish Tribe, a key component is buy-in from police departments to not only collect more detailed data, but also to create new ways to gather it by building trust in the communities they patrol. For many police departments, that could mean training officers on the complexities of Indigenous identity.

“At the end of the day, that’s how we’re going to collect good data,” she said.

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Anti-coup protesters face a row of riot police in Yangon on February 19, 2021. (photo: CNN)
Anti-coup protesters face a row of riot police in Yangon on February 19, 2021. (photo: CNN)


Anatomy of a Massacre: How Myanmar's Military Terrorized Its People With Weapons of War
Joyce Sohyun Lee, Shibani Mahtani, Meg Kelly and Atthar Mirza, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "When Myanmar's military seized power in a Feb. 1 coup, millions across the country took to the streets in protest."

oise from the nearby pagoda roused Aung and his family before dawn on April 9. Peering out his window, he saw dozens of soldiers shouting and cursing as they streamed onto trucks, rifles slung across their chests. It was barely 4 a.m.

The engines of dozens of vehicles revved to a start and took off, with soldiers following on foot. Suddenly, Aung’s power cut out, plunging his neighborhood in the city of Bago into darkness. Aung tried to check Facebook and WhatsApp, hoping others would know what was going on, but mobile Internet was down, too.

He hurried his wife and two young sons into a small bedroom where they huddled together, determined not to be seen or heard. The sound of gunshots pierced the silence. The family emerged briefly some 14 hours later, peeking out their windows when they heard the rowdy chatter and din of the engines return.

The soldiers were back. With them were dozens of limp, bloodied bodies, piled up on the flatbed trucks.

Aung and his sons watched as the uniformed men dragged the dead like sacks of rice into the monastery compound, a place Aung associated with calm and peace. Some victims were still breathing, the life slowly draining out of their bodies. One soldier kicked a corpse several times, Aung said.

“It was horrifying to see,” he said. Aung and other witnesses interviewed for this article spoke on the condition that they be identified only by parts of their names, citing concerns for their safety.

By the end of that day, the Myanmar military, known as the Tatmadaw, and police officers had killed at least 82 people, according to groups tracking protest deaths — making it the deadliest single crackdown since the military seized power. A Washington Post investigation of that day’s events reveals the use of counterinsurgency tactics, specialized military units and military-grade weaponry against civilian protesters — resulting in a high number of casualties.

The Post reviewed roughly 15,000 videos and images captured by civilians, as well as data showing the number of people killed since Feb. 1, to reconstruct the massacre in Bago. Interviews with seven eyewitnesses and analysis of geolocated videos and photos from Bago reveal that heavy weaponry was used against protesters. Analyses of Internet data and troop movements show a sophisticated level of planning by the military to crush the uprising.

The Post also analyzed nearly 20,000 TikTok videos of Myanmar security forces across the country, including soldiers from the elite Light Infantry Divisions and police officers. The clips offer a glimpse at the mind-set of the soldiers, who are seen advocating violence against civilians and celebrating deaths of protesters.

Taken together, the videos demonstrate a pattern of behavior and tactics in line with previous massacres in Myanmar, including the 2017 Rohingya crackdown that is being investigated by the International Court of Justice as genocide.

“It is very systematic [and] the pattern of violence is very, very clear,” said Tom Andrews, the United Nations’ special rapporteur for Myanmar and a senior human rights fellow at Yale Law School, who reviewed The Post’s materials.

“These are crimes against humanity,” he said, noting especially the premeditation before the attacks in Bago.

A spokesman for the military government did not respond to requests for comment.

Strategic location

When the military seized power, it sparked a crisis in a country whose democratic progress six years earlier was heralded as a foreign policy victory by the Obama administration. Within days, demonstrations spread through Myanmar. The Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, a nongovernmental organization that maps global crises, recorded 4,700 anti-coup demonstrations by the end of June, 98 percent of them peaceful.

The security forces soon turned to deadly weapons, turning cities into bloody battlefields. In parts of Yangon and Mandalay, the largest cities, the military imposed martial law — giving the generals total control, including over the judiciary and law enforcement.

By early April, as the risks associated with protesting grew, only a few pockets of large-scale resistance remained. One of these was in Bago, a city along Myanmar’s main highway connecting Yangon with the capital, Naypyidaw, and Mandalay.

Hoping to defend their city against the military, protesters built makeshift bunkers out of sandbags and other materials. Some were the height of two-story homes and ran across major streets and intersections. Tens of thousands took up positions in these fortifications during the day, protest leaders said, while a smaller group stayed at night alongside volunteer medics.

Protesters built mobile barricades like the one seen in this video shared on March 20 throughout the city. The barricades were moved from one place to another depending on necessity, residents told The Post.

Angered by the armed forces’ brutality toward peaceful demonstrators, some residents began to adopt violent tactics. They launched homemade bombs at military-linked targets and armed themselves with homemade guns. In early April, less than a week before the Bago massacre, videos showed the city’s residents carrying crude arms, as seen in this TikTok video posted on April 3.

On April 5, two unidentified men on motorcycles threw a homemade bomb into the Bago headquarters of MyTel, a military-operated telecommunications company. No casualties were reported, and witnesses told local media the bomb did not detonate. State media referred to the incident as a “violent” activity carried out by “terrorists.”

Day of terror

Phones across Bago began buzzing furiously on the evening of April 8 with news of an impending military operation. Most residents dismissed it as rumor, witnesses told The Post in interviews. Front-line protesters and medics took their positions at the barricades as usual. Then, their mobile Internet shut down — leaving them in a communications blackout.

Data collected by the IP Observatory, a research group at Australia’s Monash University that monitors the quality of Internet service around the world, shows the military blocked the Internet in Bago for increasingly longer periods in the days preceding April 9. Most days, the Internet was shut down overnight from 1 a.m. to 6 a.m. On weekends, the blockage lasted until 9 a.m., probably in anticipation of demonstrations. But as protests continued, the eight-hour offline period would extend to Mondays and Tuesdays.

“It seems [the military] got more nervous, or more ambitious with their appetite for this practice,” said Simon Angus, an associate professor with the Monash IP Observatory. After the massacre, the Internet shutdowns continued from 1 a.m. to 9 a.m. daily. The military restored full Internet access to the city 19 days later.

The data reveals that the military gave “orders most likely on a weekly, or perhaps daily, basis to the Internet service providers, given the pattern that emerges by day of the week,” Angus said.

Photos and eyewitness accounts show troops making their way toward the makeshift barricades along MaGaDit Road, a main north-south thoroughfare in Bago intersecting with the highway. Among them were soldiers from the Bago-based Light Infantry Division 77 — one of the elite military divisions that also led the 2017 crackdown against Rohingya Muslims — whose troops were stationed in Shin Saw Pu pagoda, near Aung’s home.

Military troops began attacking the first, smaller barricades where only a few protesters were stationed, before steadily moving south along MaGaDit Road. Using geolocated videos and measurements of shadows to estimate the time of day, The Post found that troops fired at several of these defense barricades, forcing protesters to retreat farther south.

Soe, a 24-year-old volunteer medic stationed at the defense barricade on Hmor Kan 17 Street and MaGaDit Road, said her team received their first wounded person around 6 a.m. He had been shot in the neck.

“At the first glance, we knew he was dead,” Soe said. “But his friend who carried him to our clinic was very upset and told us to save him.”

The friend, she said, soon accepted there was nothing that could be done and slung the body across his shoulder. But more and more injured began arriving, and the sound of gunfire became louder. Soe’s team was forced to retreat, leaving about 10 slain protesters behind.

“It was like the front line of war,” she said. “We are not medics who are trained for such a battlefield. We are just freshly graduated doctors and medical students.”

Zaya, a front-line protester also at a defense barricade along the same road, said he and others there heard the sounds of heavy weaponry around 9 a.m. The wall, which withstood gunfire for hours, began to shake and collapse. Soldiers then rushed forward, he said, shooting indiscriminately.

“They were killed like goats in a slaughterhouse,” he said.

The editor from Hantarwadi Media posted to Facebook at 10:23 a.m. that all the protester strongholds had been seized by the military, and that they were surrounded on all sides. Each time protesters were forced to move south, more troops were waiting for them.

Richard Horsey, senior adviser on Myanmar to the International Crisis Group who also reviewed The Post’s materials, said this tactic of “herding people into a ‘kill zone’ where troops are in position to trap and fire on an enemy” is “aimed at eliminating an opponent.”

“This is standard operating procedure for Myanmar’s light infantry shock troops, but totally inappropriate — and potentially a crime against humanity — when used against civilians,” he added.

To the east of MaGaDit Road, the military similarly advanced on protesters at a key defense post on San Daw Twin Road.

At The Post’s request, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute ran the April 9 videos from Bago through a program developed at the university to detect the weapon type based on a data set of thousands of gunshot videos. At one of the northern barricades along MaGaDit Road, Junwei Liang, one of the researchers, concluded the military fired lethal, supersonic bullets, probably from a rifle, at the protesters.

Security forces had been photographed in Bago before April 9 along MaGaDit Road armed with the MA-1, the Tatmadaw’s standard rifle.

Witnesses told The Post that security forces used these rifles to try to bring down the massive sandbag barricades erected by protesters, and turned to rocket-propelled grenades when those failed. Several protest leaders said they were able to hold their positions against the gunfire but abandoned their posts immediately once they heard the sounds of heavier weapons.

“We all were expecting only bullets from them, not RPGs,” said Myo Ko, a 25-year-old protester who was at one of the barricades. “We were not even able to help each other.”

While The Post could not independently confirm the photos were taken in Bago, the photos were first posted online on April 9 and the metadata on the images are consistent with the time of the Bago attacks.

Rifle grenades are small munitions that fit over a barrel and explode on impact, according to Brian Castner, a weapons analyst for Amnesty International’s Crisis Team. “It’s only designed to kill,” he said. The munitions are different from rocket-propelled grenades, though the two are often confused because they share a similar silhouette, he added.

Front-line protesters, meanwhile, were armed with slingshots and crude, homemade guns, which they started carrying as early as April 3. At several barricades on the morning of the massacre, protesters tried unsuccessfully to defend themselves with these weapons.

“There was no way to resist or push back against the soldiers because we had only air-pressure guns at the best,” Zaya said. “Your comrades were lying on the streets with gunshot wounds, and you couldn’t do anything.”

Erasing evidence, silencing survivors

By early afternoon, the barricades were destroyed and more than 80 people had been killed. According to the Assistance Association for Political Prisoners, more than a quarter of the deaths occurred along MaGaDit Road. Soldiers, however, continued a campaign of terror for two days — going from house to house finding suspected protesters.

A photo taken in the aftermath showed the civilian defense post on San Daw Twin Road completely destroyed.

Myo Ko, the protest leader, said more than 100 police officers and soldiers raided his home, destroying everything in sight. They took motorbikes, sacks of rice, documents and cash, he said, replicating a pattern of looting common elsewhere in the country. Then they locked the gates so he could not return.

That same night, Aung once again saw soldiers in the pagoda on the move, this time loading bodies back onto the trucks and transporting them to a different location. After the trucks left, he said, soldiers removed the blood with water and soap.

“At around 11 p.m., the compound looked as if nothing happened there,” he said. “There was no blood nor no dead bodies left there.”

The military claimed that two members of the security forces and two rioters were injured, and only one was killed.

Hantarwadi Media’s Facebook page has not been updated since April 18.

Satellite imagery taken by Maxar Technologies on April 23 shows empty streets and no sign of the barricades.

The photos and videos that emerged from Bago in the wake of the massacre capture only a small percentage of the brutality and bloodshed, said Benjamin Strick of Myanmar Witness, a team collecting and investigating evidence of possible human rights incidents across Myanmar.

As the military restricted the Internet and increased monitoring of protesters, video and images shared from Myanmar became self-censored, he said. Fewer videos of demonstrations and military violence were filmed and shared with groups like his, he said, and photos were blurred to hide faces.

“Reviewing this footage is really scary to see because you feel like the carnage continues and you can’t see what happens, yet I feel like the people in Bago were so desperate to get the message out,” Strick said. Months on, his team still did not have a full picture of what happened in the city that day, he added.

Father’s sons

As the killings were taking place on the ground in Bago and elsewhere, some among the security forces were making their loyalties clear on social media — offering both insight into and evidence of the military’s thinking.

Myanmar’s military, which ruled the country for half a century before making way for a nominally civilian transition that began in 2010, remains the most powerful institution in the country but also the most secretive and insular. The success of operations like the one in Bago and elsewhere in the country hinges on the willingness of soldiers and police to follow instructions from commanders, and open fire against their own people.

The Post reviewed TikTok videos recorded by 200 police officers and soldiers in the wake of the February coup, most of them younger men. While it is not possible to geolocate these videos or connect them to specific massacres, they offer unique insight into the thinking of the military’s foot soldiers, and show why defections remain rare. These videos appear to display an unwavering loyalty to military commander Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, and in many cases, an enthusiasm for violent crackdowns against protesters.

Hundreds of the videos reviewed across these accounts contain violent language and threats, many of them sexually explicit, interspersed between videos of lip-synced duets and daily life. Soldiers and police officers celebrated the deaths of protesters, while others threatened female protesters with sexual violence. Many of these videos included emoji, music and other effects that are a hallmark of TikTok’s platform.

In language consistent across multiple accounts, soldiers characterized themselves as “sons” of the commander in chief, whom they call father. They threatened “daughters” — the female protesters who support Aung San Suu Kyi, the ousted civilian leader now detained by the military. Several tried to conceal the patches on their uniforms, but occasionally the badge would peek through, revealing soldiers from notorious Light Infantry Division units.

In one video uploaded in March, a Tatmadaw soldier with a patch that suggests he is a member of Light Infantry Division 99, tells his followers to “get f — ed” if they do not accept military rule. Other videos show soldiers looting possessions from protesters and forcing detained protesters to mock themselves and others in the pro-democracy movement. One popular account with more than 20,000 followers regularly posts threatening messages against protesters and in one video shows an animated video game character decapitating Suu Kyi.

The Post downloaded these videos on June 10. At the time of publishing, 160 of the 197 of these accounts were still online.

U.N. officials and human rights groups say this type of dehumanizing language heightens the schism between the Tatmadaw and the rest of the population, and is a hallmark of the build up to large-scale crackdowns.

Such language “makes it possible for them to engage in these acts of brutality,” said Andrews, the U.N. official. “It enables them psychologically to do so.”

Taking up arms

On April 9, about 50 protesters from Bago who had survived the attacks fled to nearby villages, alongside other residents. Some, including 31-year-old Zaya, eventually made it to Karen state, a region controlled by an ethnic armed group that has spent decades at war with the military.

There, he trained for about two weeks and returned to Bago. He told The Post he was part of a team that assassinated a protest leader suspected of switching sides and joining the military.

“We have pretty strong members. With support from the people, I think it will not be that difficult to retake Bago,” he said.

These sentiments are reflected across the country. Community-drawn militias are striking back, attacking military targets and those aligned with the Myanmar security forces. The Tatmadaw has not released the total number of soldiers killed by militia attacks. In a speech on Aug. 1, Min Aung Hlaing said “violent protesters” were killing civilians and causing instability.

As Myanmar’s economy collapses and anarchy takes hold, the Tatmadaw continues to operate with impunity. In a June report, the International Crisis Group said armed resistance to the Myanmar coup could displace thousands and exacerbate the humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, the country’s health-care system is on the brink of collapse as coronavirus infections and deaths rise rapidly — including in jails. Activists and former politicians locked up since the coup are without adequate treatment for the highly transmissible delta variant.

“People have lost hope that the international community will do anything meaningful to stop this horror, so they are trying to defend themselves and their families,” Andrews said.

More and more are joining local militias, Zaya said, angered in particular by the junta’s handling of the country’s spiraling coronavirus outbreak. The Bago People’s Defense Force, he said, has formed its second brigade and now has more than 1,000 members who have completed military training.

But even as he continues his fight against the Myanmar military, he carries the scars of his experience in Bago.

“It is very hard to get rid of these thoughts. I can’t sleep and have to be drunk to fall asleep,” he said. “But I noticed I fall asleep easily after I have killed a soldier or police officer.”

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Lenca protesters display images of the murdered political activist Berta Cáceres earlier this month in Tegucigalpa. (photo: Orlando Sierra/Getty)
Lenca protesters display images of the murdered political activist Berta Cáceres earlier this month in Tegucigalpa. (photo: Orlando Sierra/Getty)


Berta Cáceres' Murder Shocked the World in 2016, but the Killing of Environmental Activists Continues
Katie Livingstone, Inside Climate News
Livingstone writes: "The Indigenous activist in Honduras had won the Goldman prize for opposing the Agua Zarca Dam. But it didn't protect Cáceres in one of the world's most dangerous countries."

The Indigenous activist in Honduras had won the Goldman prize for opposing the Agua Zarca Dam. But it didn’t protect Cáceres in one of the world’s most dangerous countries.

hen the people of Rio Blanco first saw workers bringing heavy construction machinery into their village along the sacred Gualcarque River in Honduras 15 years ago, they went to Berta Isabel Cáceres for help.

Cáceres, an activist representing the Lenca tribe who co-founded the National Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), would go on for a decade leading a campaign to stop the Agua Zarca Dam, a joint venture between a Chinese dam developer, the largest in the world, and a Honduran company, Desarrollos Energeticos SA (Desa).

She filed complaints with the government, and with the project’s international funders, arguing that the dam would destroy the Lenca’s way of life. For more than a year, she also organized a Lenca blockade of roads leading to the construction site. Faced with such Indigenous opposition, the Chinese pulled out of the project.

For her work in the face of constant attacks from paramilitary security contractors and Honduran military forces supporting the project, Cáceres won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015. In a grim foretelling of her own fate, Cáceres dedicated the award to “the martyrs” who had given their lives to protect Honduras’ rivers, lands and mineral resources.

She had said many times that she feared for her own life, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights had called on Honduras to ensure her safety. But she knew such “precautionary measures” could only do so much. “When they want to kill me, they will do it,” she had said.

The moment came just after midnight on March 3, 2016, when two gunmen entered her home outside La Esperanza, and shot her four times. Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández called her murder a “crime against Honduras,” and it shocked the global community.

But the murders of environmental activists have continued in Cáceres’ homeland and globally.

Two other Lenca activists, Carlos Cerros and Felix Vasquez, were gunned down by hitmen in Honduras in just the last year, killed alongside over a dozen other land and environmental activists in the country, making Honduras one of the most dangerous places in the world to protest, according to the London-based nonprofit Global Witness.

The group tracks the growing tally of violent crimes against environmental activists worldwide and found that more than 200 environmental rights activists were murdered around the world in 2019 alone. That number is expected to be even higher in 2020, according to human rights activists.

Last month, Roberto David Castillo, a Desa execuctive, was found guilty of Cáceres’ murder by a Honduran court in Tegucigalpa. A judge found that Castillo was one of the corporate masterminds behind the assassination. Evidence revealed that a campaign had been orchestrated at the highest levels of Desa leadership to discredit the activist and ultimately plan and pay for her assassination. Castillo is awaiting sentencing and is expected to appeal his conviction.

“Today is a day of victory in a long process,” said Laura Zúñiga Cáceres, Berta Cáceres’ youngest daughter and her only family member permitted to attend the tense trial due to Covid-19 restrictions, said outside the courtroom. “This is one more step on that long path to justice. We will keep contributing to this process so that [such crimes] are not repeated, but also so that the judicial process can lead to healing.”

The guilty verdict came after years of investigations by local authorities and international groups, including the 2018 conviction of seven men who carried out the attack. The seven are appealing their convictions. The Castillo verdict marked a rare victory for the global environmental justice movement against a corporate “intellectual author” in the murder of an activist, COPINH said in a statement.

Nina Lahkani, a journalist and author of the 2020 book, “Who Killed Berta Cáceres? Dams, Death Squads, and an Indigenous Defender’s Battle for the Planet,” said Castillo’s conviction was “unprecedented.”

“He is the most senior person so far to have been tried and convicted for murder and really, hugely significant in the country where impunity is the rule,” Lahkani said.

The trial against Castillo and his guilty verdict were only possible because of the notoriety of Cáceres and the relentless pursuit of the truth by her family and the International Advisory Group of Experts team, or GAIPE, that they privately hired to investigate the murder, said Scott Badenoch, a visiting attorney at the Environmental Law Institute in Washington.

“We need to recognize that this is incredibly common—people are lost all over the planet, all the time because they spoke out,” Badenoch said.

Roxanna Altholz, co-author of the GAIPE report and co-director of the International Human Rights Law Clinic in California, agreed that violence against environmentalists is an alarming and growing threat. She said the Cáceres murder showed the larger power dynamics at play behind global environmental justice conflicts. “It wasn’t about a criminal prosecution,” she said. “It’s really about dismantling the system.”

“A person didn’t pull the trigger,” she added, noting that Desa still held the land rights, awarded by the national government, to exploit the native resources around the Gualcarque river, which Cáceres had fiercely protested against. “A system pulled the trigger that ended Berta’s life.”

Huge extractive companies find legal loopholes to operate beyond national and even international laws to exploit the natural and human resources in countries with high rates of corruption and legal impunity for wrongdoers, Badenoch said. “They call themselves multinational, but they might as well call themselves extrajudicial—they are bigger than any one country’s laws,” he said. “The only thing that could be big enough to hold them accountable is an international institution that currently does not exist.”

Legal Avenues in the US and Internationally, As Well as Honduras

Indigenous groups and a human rights organization in Brazil have asked the International Criminal Court in the Hague to open an investigation into whether President Jair Bolsonaro and other top Brazilian officials have committed crimes against humanity through a “state policy” that threatens Indigenous tribes by plundering the wealth of the Amazon. That policy, the complaints allege, has led to the murders of numerous environmental activists in Brazil.

For now, the court’s jurisdiction is limited to genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of aggression. But Bolsonaro’s rampant deforestation of the Amazon and the threat posed by climate change have prompted world leaders like Pope Francis and French President Emmanuel Macron to support a campaign for a new international crime called “ecocide” that would outlaw widespread environmental destruction.

Supporters cite Bolsonaro’s actions in the Amazon as a prime example of ecocide happening in real-time. Environmental justice advocates in Honduras said the destruction of Cáceres’ Lenca territory is also a case of real-time ecocide.

Earlier this year, a panel of lawyers proposed a new legal definition of ecocide in hopes that the International Criminal Court’s members will add the crime to the Court’s mandate and provide a clear path to ending the impunity of “extrajudicial,” multinational actors.

The inclusion of ecocide as the fifth crime against peace is far from certain. And if it is included, the prosecution of ecocidal crimes will face similar enforcement challenges as the Court’s other four crimes, according to Badenoch, who added that the process depends on sovereign countries to assist with detaining suspects.

But as the Cáceres case illustrates, there are already some effective legal avenues at the national level that, with the support of the global community, can result in breakthrough cases of justice.

In March, U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, a Georgia Democrat, reintroduced the Berta Cáceres Human Rights in Honduras Act that would limit U.S. funding to Honduras until all of Cáceres’ murderers were brought to justice and the country makes significant improvements combating corruption and impunity in its judicial and administrative systems. The bill has 58 Democratic co-sponsors.

Johnson said that he was shocked by Cáceres’ murder, which occurred less than a year after he had met her in Washington to discuss her work and the growing campaign of violence against activists in Honduras. Johnson originally introduced the bill in 2016 just months after her death. He said there has been some renewed interest in the legislation since the Castillo verdict, including the addition of four more co-sponsors, but passage is not expected soon.

“I’d like to see the United States take a more forceful stand around the world when it comes to human rights violations,” he said about the bill, acknowledging the need for legislation that could have an impact beyond just the one country.

Castillo’s sentencing was scheduled for earlier this month in Honduras, but the presiding judges have already said they expect deliberations to take longer than usual because of the “complex” nature of the case. In an unexpected announcement during the trial, the Honduran prosecutor’s office said that there was already an additional ongoing investigation into another former Desa executive.

Environmental justice advocates said that they hope that judicial rulings like these help people understand the dangers faced by environmental defenders of tribal lands around the world.

“They are the planet. Their whole lives, they live off the land, they live off the natural resources, they live off the water. This isn’t a battle for the environment,” Lakhani said. “It’s a battle for people, it’s a battle for communities. It’s a battle for the right to exist.”

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