Mexican Peasants Pay the Price for U.S. Energy Consumption
Chances are, the average U.S. citizen has no idea that their
demand for electricity might require that a Mexican village be
flooded for a hydroelectric dam. The question is: if the
environmental and human costs were known, would we consume just
a little bit less? As part of my own personal battle against
under-estimating people, I’m betting that a little bit of
knowledge would go a long way. That high environmental cost,
which goes hand-in-hand with a slew of human rights abuses, is
not likely to sit right, even if that average U.S. citizen is
comfortably sipping a Coke in an air-conditioned movie theatre.
Come for a quick tour south of the border to hear how the
Mexican countryside is being flooded to beef up our grid and
what Mexican grassroots organizations are doing about it.
Food Sovereignty: Resistance
and a Way Forward
Just outside of the city of Oaxaca, I spoke with Aldo
Gonzalez from the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of
Oaxaca (UNOSJO). He hikes through the Sierra Juarez mountains,
lending a hand to Zapotec communities seeking food sovereignty.
On the one hand, UNOSJO keeps an eye out for companies preying
on community resources—whether water, timber, minerals, or seed
stock. On the other hand, UNOSJO promotes agroecological
techniques so that families can grow adequate food for
themselves and, in good years, sell surplus in local
markets—core principles of food soverignty. This work, supported
by organizations like
Grassroots International includes educating children and
adults in simple terms about globalization’s threats, the policy
environment that has eroded public support to small farmers and
Zapotec techniques and traditions of caring for shared water and
land.
Aldo was one of the first indigenous leaders in Mexico to
detect
genetically modified corn strains in Oaxacan fields and has
seen firsthand that dams, mining, and maize don’t mix. “For the
indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica, corn is our blood, our bones,
our flesh,” Aldo told me. “Without corn, we’re nothing. For that
reason, we’re not going to let anyone disfigure corn, rob it of
its essence, kill it or kill us.” UNOSJO shares a vision of
autonomy and sovereignty with other indigenous and peasant
allies across Mesoamerica with which they work.
Increasing Pressures on Land and Territory
Judging by statistics of foreign direct investment, Mexico is
“enjoying” a development boom. But who’s really enjoying it? The
country’s economic upsurge is powered largely by transnational
industries scouring indigenous lands for mineral-rich veins, windy
plains and floodable canyons.
At a recent water and energy strategy forum, Professor Octavio Rosas
Landa from the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), presented a
global energy matrix to farmers seeking to learn about how worldwide
energy consumption threatens their natural resources.
Among the 400 farmers in attendance was Carlos Beas, director of
UCIZONI, a Grassroots International partner working on
food sovereignty in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. “What do we get in
exchange for our resources?” asked Beas, before he then answered his own
question. “We get divisions in our community. Some people agree to rent
their land. Other people are dead set against it. The government and the
companies divide up our communities and where we used to live well
together, now we fight.”
Raising questions about the costs of green energy, UCIZONI’s members
are particularly concerned about the environmental impacts of a giant
wind farm on Oaxaca’s isthmus that has ruined thousands of acres of
agricultural land and
provides meager revenue. As poor farmers that lead low-consumption
lives, UCIZONI’s members have no need for increased energy supply.
Recent Mexican governments have chosen to put their increasingly
imported eggs in the megaproject basket. Megaprojects are grand
infrastructure works that tie Mexico into the global economy, offering a
way for Mexico to sell its abundant natural resources and cheap labor
around the world.
What broke Mexico’s farming economy and opened the floodgates to
megaprojects?
Dammed if they Do…
Professor Landa described policies of the 80s and 90s, when Mexico
was instructed by foreign creditors to abide by neo-liberalism and
structural adjustment principles. The formula, replicated throughout the
developing world, demanded that Mexico shrink its public spending
by—among other budget cuts—removing public support for small farmers.
Mexican farming families split apart when fathers and sisters had to
leave for Mexican cities and the U.S. to seek work. In the 1990s, when
constitutional reform broke up collective lands and the North American
Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) inundated Mexican markets with cheap U.S.
corn, even more farmers went broke.
The water and energy forum was held outdoors in a rural schoolyard in
Aguacaliente, Guerrero, a community slated to disappear under the rising
waters of the proposed La Parota dam. In the eyes of the visitors that
had come from afar to the forum to sleep on the hard ground under tarps
in a schoolyard, Aguacaliente’s community organization, the Council of
Communities Opposed to the Parota Dam (CECOP) is an inspiration that has
thus far held back
construction of
the dam.
What’s behind the interest in Mexico’s land and minerals? You can
probably imagine that it has a lot to do with Mexico’s insatiable
neighbor to the north. In the U.S., economics and the environmental
movement have prevailed to tear dams down rather than construct new
ones. “In the U.S., if they propose a dam, there’s nearly a riot,”
Professor Landa explained. “Energy companies look elsewhere to fulfill
U.S. energy demand. Free Trade agreements like NAFTA make that a lot
easier.” Poor and marginalized indigenous communities with little
political power are easy targets for the world’s energy and mineral
companies.
Participants at the forum learned that Mexico exports 40 percent of
the energy that it produces. Through megaprojects like the Plan Puebla
Panama, the U.S. seeks to fulfill its energy appetite through a
regionalized electrical grid, stretching from Mexico to Colombia,. Sarah
Gonzales, a leader of a growing resistance to high electrical rates,
traveled 25 hours from Campeche to participate in the form. She said, “I
came here upset about my high energy rates. Now that I see that we’re
giving up our lands and minerals to produce energy for the U.S., I’m
more convinced than ever that our fight is right. We’re proposing a fair
“social” price for electricity.” Increasingly, communities are
withholding electrical payments to the Federal Electrical Commission and
using the funds to maintain their local energy infrastructure.
Sarah’s grassroots organizing doesn’t come without high costs. For
her activism work, she went into hiding shortly after the forum and at
the time of this writing
is under arrest. Similarly, in the state of Oaxaca, Father Martin
Octavio Garcia Ortiz, a priest whose parish sits close to the San Jose
El Progreso mine has been slandered in the press of subversively
applying liberation theology to his pastoral work. That is, he has
encouraged parishioners to ask hard questions of a Canadian mining
company, La Fortuna, whose mining operation threatens parishioners’
clean water. Dozens of farmers were recently beaten and arrested for
peacefully blocking the entrance to the mine.
Insult to injury to the indigenous communities pillaged for their
resources is that they are often criminalized for what might be
considered upstanding citizen watchdog work. There was a strong feeling
at the forum that the flow of U.S. weapons to Mexico’s police and
military forces for its war on drugs contributes to the repression and
violence.
A Hopeful Alliance Emerges
Given the necessity to work together towards food sovereignty,
Oaxacan organizations like UNOSJO and Ser Mixe, a powerful land rights
organization serving Oaxaca’s Mixe peoples, have recently joined hands
to form a “Collective for Defense of Territorial Rights.” There was a
hopeful tenor to their inaugural forum entitled,
“Weaving
Resistance”. People saw silver linings in the negative economic
trends, which they feel acutely as family members working in the U.S.
send home less help. What will happen to these megaprojects if worldwide
consumer demand drops? People expressed interest in working closely with
United States’ organizations like Grassroots International to pressure
the Obama administration to put international human rights ahead of “the
American way of life.”
A participant in the “Weaving Resistance” forum shared, “When we take
on a transnational mining company, they call us crazy. But what else are
we going to do? It’s a big sacrifice; we have less time for our kids and
work. So we can’t leave here without beginning to construct our own
government, without proposing laws that protect us and our natural
resources, and without working together to grow food for our families.”
It’s a long process of resistance and proposal to create a global
economic system in which a hot summer day in New York doesn’t mean that
another nameless Mexican village is targeted for inundation. Bless the
Mexican activists in their resource rights struggles that place
tortillas above air conditioners.
©2009. Grist Magazine, Inc. All rights reserved. To
subscribe or visit go to:
http://www.grist.org |