For most Americans and other rich
nations’ workers, defending their jobs may involve trying to
keep a company from moving to a low-wage country or negotiating a
better contract, but what if defending your way of life is keeping
transnational corporations from destroying your land, water and your
life?
Usually,
there is little to fear from falling short of your goals at the
bargaining table, but for land and water defenders, the difference is
between life and death and the killings go on continuously in many
countries and the perpetrators have little fear from arrest for their
crimes and even less in prosecution of those charges.
Global
Witness, a multinational human rights organization, reported recently
that 227 environmental and land-rights activists were murdered in
2020, the highest number since GW has seen since it started keeping
track in 2012. One-third of the murders, they said, were linked to
resource exploitation.
“Land
and environmental defenders are ordinary people trying to peacefully
protect their homes, livelihoods and the health of our planet from
the harmful impacts of industries like oil and gas, mining and
agribusiness,” the group reported. “For years, they have
led the global fight against the causes and impacts of climate
breakdown, challenging irresponsible businesses rampaging unhampered
through forests, wetlands, oceans and biodiversity hotspots.”
It’s
too easy for the average American to say, “That’s in
another country. It has nothing to do with me and I can’t do
anything about it.” Americans can do something about it and it
seems that the younger generation is trying to organize around these
very issues. Environmental crimes can be dealt with in the U.S.
because, in one way or another, the transnational corporations are
either headquartered here or have substantial operations in this
country. Exposing their crimes is one way to begin to curb their
rampant wrongdoing, both here and in other, usually developing,
countries.
Like
corporations and governments riding roughshod over indigenous people
within U.S. territory, these same corporations go forth in developing
countries like Brazil, where 23 environmental defenders were murdered
in 2020. The logging industry was implicated in more murders than any
other industry. Where does the lumber for all that decking on those
$500,000 “modest” homes come from? It comes from places
in Central and South America and Asia, where the people are trying to
save their livelihoods and their very lives. Forest people and
pastoralists are trying to save their homes, but they have little
defense against the depredations of giant corporations and the
complicit governments of those countries.
Peoples
who have lived on the land and in the forests have determined ways to
live sustainably in those places and many have done so for many
hundreds, or thousands, of years. When a corporation comes to their
government and offers jobs and money, little thought is given to
those voiceless people whose lives depend on the approval or
disapproval of the project by (usually) the president, who might be
easily swayed by the dangling of money by the usurpers. When approval
is given, for example for an oil lease, the mayhem and destruction
begin. It is what happened in Ecuador, where Texaco, then Chevron,
left the lands and waters of 30,000 people a toxic wasteland. Courts
in that country found Chevron liable for $9.5 billion in damages.
Indigenous people there declared that to be just a start in the
clean-up of their lands and waters. Chevron does not want to pay a
penny and will fight the people and their lawyer, Steve Donziger,
“until hell freezes over and then we’ll fight it out on
the ice.”
Chevron
could pay the $9.5 billion and more. It’s a very rich company
and they have already spent millions pursuing the case in court in
the U.S. and they have no intention to mitigate their poisoning of
the land and water and people numbering 30,000.
This
kind of corporate power, which translates into power in the countries
where they operate is what Chevron is protecting. It’s not the
money, it’s the principle that they will not be made to stand
in the dock for their crimes against humanity. The problem? Neither
corporations nor governments see what Chevron and Shell in Nigeria
did as crimes against humanity. They weren’t crimes at all,
just progress.
When
the defenders get in the way, however, that is, when they are
effective in slowing or stopping some of the worst projects, the
powers that be become more forceful. They resort to murder and, in
most cases, they do it with impunity. No arrests, no charges, no
prosecution. One exception might be the murder of Berta Caceres, a
Honduran environmental activist, indigenous leader, and co-founder
and coordinator of the Council of Popular and Indigenous
Organizations of Honduras. She was assassinated in 2016 at the age of
44. Seven men were convicted of her murder and the top boss of the
dam she opposed was implicated.
Murders
such as Berta’s usually go unnoticed by most of the world, but
she had just won, in 2015, a most prestigious environmental award,
The Goldman Prize. That raised the world’s awareness of Berta,
but there are others in many countries who do the same work and are
killed under similar circumstances as Berta.
When
Global Witness tallies up the deaths of environmental defenders each
year, they say they are quite sure that it is an undercount, because
many attacks on such defenders go unreported. The group said: “In
a savage irony, while the killers go free, the activists themselves
are being branded as criminals. The powerful are increasingly using
laws, arrests, intimidation and smear campaigns to silence those who
oppose them. These subtler threats don’t make headlines like
murders do – which is why they are so effective for silencing
dissent.”
The
light of day is the main solution to such crimes that are committed
on a daily basis in many places around the world. Knowing the names
of corporations committing such crimes and knowing who are the CEOs
and other officers of those corporations, by name, will go a long way
to bringing to justice those whose crimes border on genocide.
