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25 January 22
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The conservative Court adds more cases to its growing culture war docket.
These cases are the culmination of a years-long strategy by conservative activists — and by one activist in particular — to win a court decision invalidating affirmative action. The president of Students for Fair Admissions, the lead plaintiff in the Harvard and UNC cases, is not a student at all. It is Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who was also the driving force behind several other lawsuits asking the courts to expand the power and influence of white people.
The two cases are also the first challenge to race-conscious university admissions programs to reach the Court since Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin (2016), which imposed strict limits on affirmative action programs but did not forbid them entirely.
The Court that will decide these cases looks very different from the one that considered affirmative action in 2016. Fisher was a 4-3 decision, because Justice Antonin Scalia died several months before Fisher was handed down and Justice Elena Kagan was recused. The four-justice majority, moreover, included retired Justice Anthony Kennedy and the now-late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Scalia, Kennedy, and Ginsburg have since been replaced by three reliable conservatives: Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett. So, barring an extraordinary surprise from at least two members of the Court’s 6-3 conservative majority, affirmative action is probably doomed.
Why affirmative action in university admissions is in deep trouble
After Fisher, universities may only make very limited use of race in their admissions process.
Take the Harvard case as an example. Harvard is an extraordinarily selective university. If you group all undergraduate applicants into deciles based on their academic records, Harvard still rejects more than 85 percent of applicants in the top decile. Race is one of several factors that can push an outstanding applicant who is on the cusp of admission into the pool of students invited to attend Harvard.
As a lower court that upheld Harvard’s admissions program explained, a student on the border between admission and rejection may be “tipped” into the pool of accepted applicants for a variety of reasons, including “outstanding and unusual intellectual ability, unusually appealing personal qualities, outstanding capacity for leadership, creative ability, athletic ability, legacy status, and geographic, ethnic, or economic factors.”
In practice, this means that, if two equally extraordinary applicants apply to Harvard, but one is white and the other is Latino, the Latino student is more likely to be admitted unless the white applicant has some other factor in their favor — perhaps the white student’s father attended Harvard, or perhaps the student is from a state that is underrepresented at the university.
The Harvard plaintiffs argue that even this limited consideration of race in admissions is illegal.
The Constitution generally views any policy that draws distinctions based on race as highly suspect, and a federal law — Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — imposes the same restrictions on private universities such as Harvard that the Constitution applies to public universities with affirmative action programs.
Nevertheless, in Grutter v. Bollinger (2003), the Court held that the social benefits of diversity justify allowing universities to take a limited account of race when deciding who to admit as a student. “Numerous studies show that student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and ‘better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society, and better prepares them as professionals,’” the Court explained in Grutter.
Grutter also noted that “major American businesses have made clear that the skills needed in today’s increasingly global marketplace can only be developed through exposure to widely diverse people, cultures, ideas, and viewpoints.” The Harvard and UNC plaintiffs ask the Supreme Court to overrule Grutter.
Conservative judges typically believe that the collective benefits society gains from having more diverse campuses must bow to the individual interests of college applicants. And, given the Supreme Court’s 6-3 divide, that conservative viewpoint is likely to prevail.
The Court’s decision to hear the Harvard and UNC cases adds two more major cases to the Court’s already-bulging culture war docket.
In Barrett’s first term on the bench, the Court made expanding the right of religious conservatives to seek exemptions from laws that they object to on religious grounds one of its highest priorities. And the Court heard cases earlier this term that could significantly expand gun rights, force taxpayers to fund religious education, and even overrule Roe v. Wade.
Members of the Oath Keepers militia. (photo: Scott Olson/Getty Images)
In a story published Friday, Jane Mayer detailed Virginia "Ginni" Thomas' ties to conservative groups.
Among her connections is Stewart Rhodes, who founded the extremist militia group in 2009. Prosecutors previously said the Oath Keepers planned out attacks on the Capitol and held trainings in the weeks before January 6, 2021.
Thomas, a conservative activist and attorney, co-hosted a Remember the Ladies Banquet at the 2010 Liberty XPO … Symposium, which has been described as the "largest conservative training event in history," alongside Moms for America president Kimberly Fletcher.
The symposium also featured Rhodes, who earlier this month was arrested and charged with seditious conspiracy in connection to the Capitol riot. His arrest and charges marked the first time federal prosecutors brought sedition charges against anyone in the investigation into the Capitol siege. He has pleaded not guilty.
Rhodes is just one of many connections Thomas has to right-wing extremists and the January 6 insurrection, Mayer reported.
Fletcher, for instance, who co-hosted the banquet with Thomas, gave two speeches the day before the riot in which she spread the false claim that the 2020 election had been stolen from former President Donald Trump.
The New Yorker report on Thomas' connections to right-wing groups and those involved in the Capitol riot comes on the heels of the Supreme Court denying Trump's request to block the January 6 house select committee from obtaining presidential records for their investigation.
Thomas' husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, issued the lone dissenting vote. According to the New Yorker, Thomas is also involved with parties whose cases are presented before her husband in the Supreme Court.
Bruce Green, a professor at Fordham specializing in legal ethics, told Mayer that the appearance of Thomas's political activism has an impact on the perception of justice and is "awful."
"They look like a mom-and-pop political-hack group, where she does the political stuff and he does the judging," Green said.
Insider has reached out to Thomas, the Supreme Court, Fletcher, and an attorney for Rhodes for comment.
A prisoner. (photo: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)
Government prepares to sell barn known as Project No 2 or Detention Site Violet, which has windowless, soundproof rooms
The government’s real estate fund, which handles assets no longer needed by the state, said on Monday it was preparing to sell the notorious former “black site”, known as Project No 2 or Detention Site Violet, for an as-yet unknown price.
Part of Washington’s secret “extraordinary rendition” programme – in which suspected Islamist militants from conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq were captured and held in jails outside the US – the 10-room building served as a detention centre in 2005 and 2006.
In its windowless and soundproofed rooms, “one could do whatever one wanted”, Arvydas Anusauskas, who led a Lithuanian parliamentary investigation into the site in 2010, told Reuters. “What exactly was going on there, we did not determine.”
Lithuania’s top tourist attraction is a former Russian KGB jail in central Vilnius where 767 people were executed during an anti-Soviet uprising in the 1940s and thousands were tortured, but there are no plans to turn the former CIA facility, which has its own power generator and water supply, into a museum.
“We don’t push any buttons, so as not to turn anything on by accident,” an employee of the real estate fund said of the facility, where fluorescent lighting and the hum of air conditioning dominate the now-empty rooms.
The European court of human rights heard in 2018 that prisoners at the site, used as a training facility by Lithuania’s intelligence service from 2007 until 2018, were shaved on arrival and blindfolded or hooded, with their legs shackled.
Earlier this month it was revealed that the Lithuanian government had paid Abu Zubaydah, the so-called “forever prisoner”, €100,000 ($113,319) in compensation for the treatment he suffered at the site, following the court’s ruling that the government had violated European laws banning torture.
Zubaydah, was captured in Pakistan six months after 9/11, accused of being a senior member of al-Qaida, and has been held without charge ever since. He is unlikely to have suffered the most brutal forms of torture in Lithuania that the CIA applied elsewhere – he was waterboarded 83 times in a single month in Thailand – but he was subjected to sensory and sleep deprivation, solitary confinement, loud noise and harsh light.
A summary of the US Senate’s report into the CIA’s torture program released in 2014 referred to “Site Violet”, though it withheld the identity of the country in which the building was based.
The creation of the site prompted tensions between different elements of the Bush administration, with the US ambassador to Lithuania complaining bitterly that the state department had been cut out of the planning process and kept in the dark.
The Senate report also noted that by the time the black site was opened, CIA personnel were suffering “mission fatigue vis-a-vis their interaction with the program” – a reference to the trauma that agents experienced as a result of participating in torture.
The detainees who were brought there had also been subjected already to so much “enhanced interrogation” – the CIA’s euphemism for torture – that many had been “all but drained of actionable intelligence”.
The CIA and lawyers for the Bush administration attempted to justify Zubaydah’s torture by claiming he was a very senior figure in al-Qaida, but it emerged he was not a member of the organisation.
Other prisoners held at the site included Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the 11 September 2001 attacks.
The site was closed in 2006 after Lithuania refused to admit a third prisoner, Mustafa al-Hawsawi, to hospital. All three men are still in detention at the US detention centre in Guantánamo Bay.
A moose in a wetland. (photo: CottageLife)
The justices will hear an appeal by Chantell Sackett and her husband Mike Sackett, who own property in Priest Lake, Idaho where they hoped to build a home, of a lower court ruling favoring the government.
The court will consider what test courts should use to determine what constitutes "waters of the United States" under the landmark 1972 Clean Water Act, the answer to which determines whether the property is subject to regulation, requiring owners to obtain permits in order to carry out construction.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 2007 determined that the Sacketts' land was part of a wetland and that they were required to obtain a permit under the Clean Water Act before beginning construction, which they had failed to do.
"The Sacketts' ordeal is emblematic of all that has gone wrong with the implementation of the Clean Water Act," said Damien Schiff, a lawyer at the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation, which represents the Sacketts.
There has been lengthy litigation and political debates over how much of a connection with a waterway a property must have in order to require a permit, with the Supreme Court issuing a ruling in 2006 that led to further uncertainty.
Four justices at that time said the law governed land with a "continuous surface connection" to a waterway while Justice Anthony Kennedy, who cast the deciding vote in the 5-4 case and has since retired, said the law extended further to areas that had a "significant nexus" to a waterway.
The new case gives the justices an opportunity to embrace the more stringent test proposed by the four justices, which business groups favor. Lower courts have found that Kennedy's test controls because he was the key vote.
The last three presidential administrations have sought to clarify the issue through regulations. Democrat Barack Obama embraced broader federal reach, while his Republican successor Donald Trump took the opposite approach. Democratic President Joe President Biden's administration is currently working on a new regulation.
The Sacketts' case reached the Supreme Court once before, with the justices ruling unanimously in 2012 that the couple could challenge in court an EPA compliance order imposing financial penalties until they restore the affected land. The area was filled in with gravel and sand after they purchased the property in 2004.
The litigation continued since then even as the regulations evolved. The EPA has since dropped its compliance order for the Sacketts but still has sought to require a permit.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last year ruled against the Sacketts, finding that the EPA had "reasonably determined" that the property was subject to Clean Water Act regulation based on Kennedy's "significant nexus" test. The Sacketts' lawyers then appealed the case to the Supreme Court.
The justices are expected to hear the case in their next term, which begins in October and ends in June 2023.
Social rights advocate and race theory educator Kimberlé Crenshaw. (photo: Ian Maddox/WP)
Recently, critical race theory burst onto the national scene in a way that probably is somewhat unrecognizable to those who have studied it. Having coined the term yourself, what has your experience been as you’ve seen it become this sort of intellectual boogeyman?
Well, one of the very first articles I wrote was “Race, Reform and Retrenchment.” The entire point was to anticipate that reform would inevitably reproduce retrenchment and backlash. That has been the history of progress around race in the United States: Modest reform creates tremendous backlash. And sometimes the backlash is more enduring than the reform.
Consider we had about a decade of Reconstruction. And we had about seven decades of white supremacy, racial tyranny, utter and complete exclusion. We had probably a good decade, maybe a decade and a half, of active civil rights reforms. And then three, four decades of conservative retrenchment, reactionary responses to these reforms that allow for people to say what they’re saying now, which is that anti-racism is racist, your civil rights violate my civil rights. These are very old and repetitive ideas. So the reform, retrenchment frame is now taking place in the midst of a tremendous resurgence of anti-democratic, anti-inclusionary politics. And, in the context of a new distribution channel that is 24 hours, amplified by completely unaccountable information sources in the Internet. There used to be that saying that a lie gets around the world three times before truth gets its boots on. I’d say now a lie gets around about a million times before truth wakes up and says, “What is happening?”
You watch definitions of work — and words — that you know what they mean be completely turned inside out by power. I mean, that’s what it is. The power to define what your words mean, the power to define what this area of study is. The power to define it in order to destroy it.
You’ve heard critical race theory called “divisive,” “state-sanctioned racism” — can you define what it is and what it isn’t for the lay person?
Critical race theory is a prism for understanding why decades after the end of segregation, over a century and a half after the end of slavery, after genocide has occurred, why racial inequalities are so enduring. Initially, critical race theory focused on law’s role in creating racial inequalities and continuously facilitating them. We were that second generation after the formal collapse of segregation to go into institutions to see the ways that these institutions — largely created during a time where most marginalized people of color were not part of them — function. What are the ways that those institutional structures continue to protect the interests that were created in slavery and that are its descendants?
The middle class was basically created through federal policy that was then distributed in a discriminatory way because of local control. A hundred and twenty billion dollars created the suburbs and did so in a racially discriminatory way. GI Bill created the middle class in a racially discriminatory way. So these are all critical ways of looking at our society.
What experiences as a young person helped inform your work? I know your parents were [politically] active?
When I was in fourth grade, off I go to this new Christian school — before we knew anything about the politics that motivated some of the Christian academies to come online — and find out that I’m one of two Black people in the school. Also, apparently my presence there is a surprise for some of the parents; we’d assumed they’d know Black people are Christians, too. But that wasn’t the point of the school. So there ensued a three-year confrontation with how Christianity and racism were not practices alien to each other in that school. It didn’t help that I was the kid who won the academic contest and went to represent the school in the region. I would always get a talk: “Remember, you’re representing us.” A lot of anxiety about that. My cheers that I brought to the school, because I was a cheerleader, like, “Um, we can’t do that. That’s a little too …” I know they were basically saying “too Black.” But it really came to a head in a class where one of the teachers read Revelations to apply to the civil right protests that were going on. She was literally teaching that the civil rights movement and then the Black Power movement, that we were in the final days and these Black activists were basically demons. And every day my hand was up: “My brother was one of those people.” And so I’m fighting back, and off to the office I go for intentional disobedience. It was the beginning of understanding how school can discipline us away from confronting the truths about our society and try to weaponize us, to be agents of some of these ridiculous ideas. And I was like, “Ma, you’ve got to get me out of this school.”
How did you have the courage to speak up then?
So my parents, they’re called race men and women of the 20th century. The motto of some of them was “lifting as we climb.” My grandmother was in a Black women’s club movement. My mother had integrated the local lunch counter and the local pool, partly because her father was the town physician for Black folks, so they were able to do some of that without having the backlash — you’d get fired for doing that. So I think that came from her background straight to me. And my father’s father was a minister, also given some degree of independence. So together their understanding was when we sit down at the dinner table, you need to have something to say about what you’ve seen in the world, what have you contributed to the world, what is your thinking. And so they would hear from me my efforts to put together what it meant in the world to be this little Black kid. [Laughs.] And so speaking my mind, at least to the world, was encouraged — they sometimes had a little issue when I said: Well, how come this particular unfairness is happening in the home? But the environment encouraged critical thinking and reflection and instilled a responsibility to address unfairness or address racism where I saw it. It just so happened it was in my classroom.
When you see all those parents out protesting at school board meetings about critical race theory being taught in the classrooms, what do you think?
I think that the Republican right-wing outrage machine is very, very powerful. I see the money behind it. I see the slick, high-production-value videos and booklets, and I see the common language and phrases, and I just know it’s a campaign. A campaign that is nicely framed as grass roots when, in fact, it is not. I see the fingerprints of the think tanks that for some time have been rooting around for something that would catch fire. And I see that parents, some of them, if you just follow some of the organizations — the Moms for Liberty — you see this is a regeneration of activists who have been in various formations. It plays well on TV, and it is a show. It’s like reality TV, which is not necessarily reality.
And I think: Where is the outrage about the things that really are putting children at risk? And there are things that are really putting children at risk, right? It is not critical race theory. And when I look at the list of topics now banned because they’re discriminatory, I can’t help but notice what’s not there: eugenics, “The Bell Curve,” things that if there really, really was concern about teaching our children ideas that are divisive and that cause us not to share in our common heritage of Americans, it would be a whole different list.
It seems that critical race theory came into the [national] conversation as a backlash to progress made after the killing of George Floyd and a grappling with long-standing, systemic issues.
Absolutely. Think about it: The George Floyd situation was a generational moment. Right? It was huge. Every state in the union had a march. The majority of people out there were not of color. Language was being shared widely for the first time: “systemic racism,” “institutionalized patterns of marginality,” “racial power.” People were saying these words in a way that they hadn’t — ever! Yet, and this is where some of the problem is, it’s like those songs where everybody knows the chorus and they sing the chorus at the top of their lungs. And then [the rest of the song is]: Mmmuuhmm da da da da mmmmmmmerm — that’s kind of the situation we had. With no real literacy beyond that, with no capacity to actually say: Okay, so tell us what that means, what needs to be done. Tell us what the policies are that allow us to unravel the institutionalized forms of inequality that you are now talking about.
And if you don’t have the ability to do it, you’ve picked a fight with a giant, and you don’t have ammunition. You don’t have troops, you don’t have the war plan to respond to it. And you know the reasons why are that this is new for many people. This was produced by a singular moment, and that moment is increasingly looking like it may be singular if we’re not prepared in this moment to actually say: This really is what structural racism is. It’s not this stuff that these other people are talking about.
You saw [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis issued an “anti-woke” act?
Yes. And he actually used Martin Luther King to support the idea. What can be more a statement of racial power than to use a martyr who died for a particular cause, to use his name in order to say that he would support eliminating further discourse about the cause that he died for? I mean, what could be more an example of this sort of boundless capacity for contradiction for hypocrisy? He was a critical race theorist before there was a name for it. So that would be bad enough if they were just using Martin Luther King as a justification, but the fact that some of these folks are also saying we need to take Martin Luther King’s books, or a story of his March on Washington, out of the curriculum even as they’re using it to justify it.
We cannot allow all of the lessons from the civil rights movement forward to be packed up and put away for storage. Because if that happens, anything and everything that speaks of diversity and fairness and inclusion will always be vulnerable to: Well, that’s just critical race theory. And so you have to recognize that the effort to pack all this together is not just about critical race theory. It’s about the entire justice project.
So how do you think about reform in a way that doesn’t cause one step forward, seven steps back?
It’s my constant question. You know, one of the things that I think about — a lot — is if we were to go back and talk to, I don’t know, Frederick Douglass in 1874 or any of the Black congressmen who were elected to serve Congress or any of the senators or the lieutenant governors who were Black or the majority who in South Carolina actually ran their governments there before the great coups that ended that experiment in multiracial democracy — if we were to say, “Look, this is what happened.” [Laughs.] “What now would you do differently? What could have been done differently?” — what would they tell us? Did they have any idea that they would be wiped out of politics altogether? Did they have any idea that some of them would be killed? Did they have any idea that race riots would be political coups? And if they had that idea, what would they have done differently?
We have been kind of raised with the assumption that everything is always forward, with the assumption that democracy is just in our DNA, and certain things are just never going to happen. Moving forward, we have to acknowledge that being vigilant and productive about preventing this kind of thing from happening again is not simply a matter of singing “Kumbaya,” it’s not just a pat on the back, it’s really looking deeply into our institutions and into our culture to understand why these things keep happening.
So when we’re looking at something like this that makes no sense, it should tell us that there’s a deeper logic driving it. And that deeper logic goes all the way back to: We are a country that was grounded in a racial project. For the longest part, we were a White nation, and our laws said so and our Constitution was interpreted to reinforce that. That doesn’t go away just because we stopped saying it.
Is it better in your mind that critical race theory is out there being talked about, even if it’s being misused, rather than existing in its pure state but in a much smaller conversation?
That is the question of the moment, and I think we won’t know the final judgment on this until history writes this story. And that turns on who’s doing the writing. [Laughs.] Which is honestly what’s at stake right now. This is about what the future knows about this moment.
My thought, my hope, is that having put front and center in the American consciousness the importance of what histories we tell will bring constituents, parents, policymakers to the table in a way that they haven’t been in the past. To really understand that to think about race is not the problem. To be racist is the problem. And racism is not primarily a thought crime; it’s an action crime. It’s an institutional problem. So is it better that this has happened? I would say, if it turns out that it makes people who should have been conversant in these ideas realize that there is no democracy without grappling with these issues, that there’s no daylight between maintaining a multiracial democracy and being fully literate on anti-racism. If people recognize now what this has to do with January 6, if they recognize now what this has to do with the deterioration of our democracy, then it will have been a good thing. Because it’s a five-alarm situation.
Soldiers in Burkina Faso. (photo: Olympia De Maismont/AFP/Getty Images)
In address on state television, mutinous soldiers say they have dissolved the government and suspended the constitution.
The announcement, signed on Monday by Lieutenant Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba and read by another officer on state television, said the takeover had been carried out without violence and those detained were in a secure location. The country’s borders have also been closed, it added.
The statement was made in the name of a previously unheard of entity, the Patriotic Movement for Safeguard and Restoration or MPSR, according to its French language acronym.
“MPSR, which includes all sections of the army, has decided to end President Kabore’s post today,” it said.
It cited the deterioration of the security situation and what it described as Kabore’s inability to unite the nation and effectively respond to the challenges it faces.
The statement said the MPSR would re-establish “constitutional order” within a “reasonable time”, adding that a nationwide nightly curfew would be enforced.
The army broadcast came after two days of confusion and fear in the capital Ouagadougou, where heavy gunfire erupted at army camps on Sunday, with soldiers demanding more support for their fight against armed groups.
President Kabore’s whereabouts was not immediately known.
Security sources earlier gave conflicting accounts of Kabore’s situation, with some saying he was being detained by the coup organisers and others saying forces loyal to him had taken him to a secure location.
Earlier, Kabore’s party said he had survived an assassination attempt, but gave no details. Several armoured vehicles belonging to the presidential fleet could be seen near Kabore’s residence on Monday, riddled with bullets. One was spattered with blood.
International reaction
United Nations chief Antonio Guterres said in a statement that he “strongly condemns any attempted takeover of government by the force of arms”, calling the events a “coup”.
The United States said it was “deeply concerned” about developments in Burkina Faso, and urged a swift return to civilian rule.
“We condemn these acts and call on those responsible to deescalate the situation, prevent harm to President Kaboré and any other members of his government in detention, and return to civilian-led government and constitutional order,” State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a statement. “We acknowledge the tremendous stress on Burkinabé society and security forces, but urge military officers to step back, return to their barracks, and address their concerns through dialogue.”
Before the army statement, the African Union and the West African bloc ECOWAS both condemned what they called an attempted coup, saying they held the military responsible for Kabore’s safety.
The landlocked country, one of West Africa’s poorest despite being a gold producer, has experienced numerous coups since independence from France in 1960.
Kabore – in power since 2015 and re-elected in 2020 – had faced waves of protests in recent months amid frustration about killings of civilians and soldiers by armed groups, some of whom have links to ISIL (ISIS) and al-Qaeda.
Security situation
Al Jazeera’s Nicolas Haque said Damiba has support from many soldiers in Burkina Faso’s army who have been involved in fighting armed groups.
“He’s someone that’s been on the front lines and seen the casualties caused by the war going on in this region of the borders of Mali, Burkina and Niger,” said Haque, reporting from Dakar, Senegal.
“He had written a book about questioning the situation between West African armies and armed groups in the area.”
Haque said the chaos in Burkina Faso is playing right into the hands of these armed groups, who favour a government that is not made up of elected officials.
“That is what they have been trying to fight off – a democratically elected government in Ouagadougou,” he said. “At the backdrop of this is the lack of ability from the former deposed president in trying to deal with the ongoing security situation.”
Burkina Faso joins the ranks of several states in the region that are now under military rule. Mali, Guinea, and Chad have seen coups in recent years.
Adama Gaye, a Senegalese political commentator, told Al Jazeera that “the failure to govern” is at the heart of these recent events.
“Anybody who has been monitoring the evolution of Burkina Faso expected this to happen – the [writing was] on the wall, clearly,” Gaye said, about the military moves on Monday.
Felipe "Pipe" Henao showing young people the correct way to plant a sapling during a planting day. (photo: PipeQ-ida/Facebook)
The forest region was once only occupied by a few nomadic Indigenous communities, but has since seen waves of colonization and conflict, rubber and coca booms, FARC rebel occupation, and most recently, rampant deforestation.
“My parents came here almost 40 years ago to colonize. They came and they made a farm in the middle of the jungle, where there lived nothing but panthers, jaguars and many other animals,” Henao said in an interview with Mongabay. “When we wanted meat, we would hunt an animal. If we wanted fish, we would throw the fishing line … we were very privileged.”
Like many in the community, Henao’s parents arrived in Calamar during a colonization wave in the 1990s to grow coca, the raw ingredient for producing cocaine. Henao remembers being involved in all aspects of the coca production process when growing up, from sowing the young plants and harvesting the leaves, to negotiating sales.
Yet what had the greatest impact on Henao was the forest they lived in, teeming with wildlife. From his family’s farm to town, it would take Henao six hours by boat or nine hours walking through the forest. Now, almost all that land has been turned into pasture for 25,000 heads of cattle.
During the occupation of the region by the FARC guerrilla group, campesinos would be allowed to clear only 1 or 2 hectares (2.5 or 5 acres) for growing coca and subsistence crops, which meant deforestation was kept at a minimum. But following the signing of the 2016 peace agreement between FARC and the government, the rebels left the area and illegal groups moved in.
“We knew that when FARC left the territory, which they had occupied for more than 60 years, the guns would be silenced, but the chainsaws would be turned on,” Henao said. “If those who gave the orders went away, who was going to protect the forest?”
“Nobody was taking their place, so some people with a lot of money came, like cattle ranchers, businessmen, and politicians, and saw empty jungle.”
According to Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM), the national deforestation rate hit a peak of 220,000 hectares (nearly 544,000 acres) in 2017, the year after the peace agreement. Deforestation figures have fluctuated in the years since, registering 171,685 hectares (424,242 acres) in 2020, according to IDEAM, showing a rising trend. And the biggest forest-related losses are in Colombia’s Amazonian region, with Guaviare department, where Henao lives, a focal point.
“I believe that the deterioration that we have in the region today is also part of the consequences of a bad implementation of the peace process,” said John Alarcan, a former FARC rebel and co-signatory of the peace agreement.
Finding solutions
Today, Alarcan leads Aso Jaguar, a youth initiative that makes art from recycled wood. He’s also completing a nursery that will provide seedlings and trees for restoration projects led by Henao, as well as providing them to communities in the areas most affected by forest loss.
Henao said that if he can involve as many people as possible and get them to change the way they relate to the environment, he hopes they’ll develop a sense of ownership that will make them more willing to protect it.
Through the organization he established, Pipe Q-ida (meaning “care for” in Spanish), he said they’ve connected with more than 150 companies and organizations in Calamar and more than 1,800 families, and mobilized more than 1,000 young people to volunteer to clean rivers, protect wetlands and plant more than 60,000 trees.
Activities like tree-planting days bring together children, families, adults, schools, the National Army—which provides logistical support and the use of trucks—and even former foes like Alarcan. Henao said the real objective of the tree planting is to create awareness.
“Even if a thousand trees fall, we will always plant one, and our message is still the same,” Henao said. “We know that every day they deforest and every weekend we plant 100, 200, 500 trees because every time we gather people to plant, we share with them our message.”
The next generation
Knowing that young people are the future of these efforts, and that they use digital platforms to entertain themselves and talk about the environment, Henao set out to amplify his message by becoming an environmental influencer: creating videos on environmental issues and providing workshops in local schools.
In many of Henao’s videos, he’s accompanied by his seven-year-old stepdaughter, Valeria RodrÃguez, known on social media as “Valeria the Guardian.” In addition to talking about environmental issues, she also leads planting workshops with other children while Henao works with adolescents and adults.
Henao said that when Valeria was four years old, she saw him recording, and when he went away, she stood in front of the camera and started to say, “Hello my fellow guardians. I’m Valeria and I invite you to nature.”
Henao and his wife, Andrea, gave Valeria space to explore. And seeing her continued interest in talking about environmental issues, Henao wrote her a script and they went into the forest to record. And she has been recording ever since.
Valeria told Mongabay that she talks with other children about the importance of taking care of nature and of the importance of the jaguar, because if it dies, so do the trees. She also emphasized the urgency of not littering, taking care of water, and not cutting down trees.
When asked about her future plans, she said she wants to make more videos, inspire people to protect the jaguar, and have her own housecat one day.
Yet for this environmental work over the years, Henao, members of his team, and even Valeria, have received threats to their lives. Henao also suffered from extortion and kidnapping and has received so many threats that he now has a full-time government-sponsored bodyguard.
And threats are not to be taken lightly in Colombia, the most dangerous place in the world to be an environmental activist. Just this week, 14-year-old Colombian Indigenous activist Breiner David Cucuñame was murdered while on patrol with an unarmed group that tries to protect Indigenous territories from invasions by illegal groups.
“We have reported deforestation head on. We have gone to court. We have reported illegal tourism. We have reported many things and it has generated so many risks for us,” said Henao, who now takes a less confrontational approach and is also conscious of how gaining greater visibility helps to decrease the risks.
Guardians of Chiribiquete
Just beyond Henao’s hometown of Calamar lies Chiribiquete, a national park the size of Switzerland. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site and home to 75,000 cave paintings, some going back more than 20,000 years, as well as at least three Indigenous communities living in voluntary isolation.
Carlos Castaño-Uribe accidently discovered the group of flat-topped mountains which contain the rock art in 1986 when he was the head of Colombia’s Natural National Parks authority (PNN). He played a fundamental role in that position to establish the national park and helping it be declared a World Heritage Site.
Yet despite its legal protections and value to humanity, Chiribiquete is under threat. According to the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), the park lost more than 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of forest cover from September 2020 to February 2021, with most of the deforestation associated with the clearing of primary forest for illegal cattle pasture.
In 2018, Castaño-Uribe published a book about Chiribiquete and worked with the PNN to promote a “Guardians of Chiribirquete” conservation strategy. It’s underpinned by the idea that the best long-term solution to protecting Chiribiquete is to include the greatest number of people through civil society.
Castaño-Uribe said the book has sold 15,000 copies, with all proceeds from the sales, approximately $370,000, going into environmental education and local capacity-building activities for youth people in the areas surrounding Chiribiquete.
Castaño-Uribe said that although this is a token sum compared to the funding received by other environmental initiatives in the area, it has already done a lot to raise awareness of the need to protect Chiribiquete and is also providing funding for youth-based environmental organizations like Henao’s Pipe Q-ida.
“We are concerned about the future that we can leave to our children,” said Wilfred Guzman, a Calamar councilman. “But right now in Calamar there is a very significant group of young people and older adults who are working to improve and restore what is out there.”
Guzman works with Henao on reforesting and environmental education initiatives. And through the youth entrepreneur association that he’s a part of, Asojec, they also provide young people with opportunities to make a living through protecting the forests.
Their projects focus on sustainable harvesting of Amazonian fruits like sacha, açaÃ, copazu, borojo and moriche, to make jams, cookies, juices, ice cream and popsicles. They currently sell the products at the local and departmental levels, but the wider aim is to reach the national level, and one day export as well.
“I think that at the end of the day, our biggest objective is to be able to leave a legacy to our children [so] that our children think differently than our parents did, who mistakenly thought that they could come, cut down the trees and just have some pasture there for the cattle,” Guzman said.
“People see the forest differently. They no longer see it as an enemy. They see it as something that has a lot of richness apart from wood and oxygen. It’s what guarantees a life of tranquility and a healthy environment.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay.
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