'Divine Strake' detonation halted

June 05, 2006 
by: Brenda Norrell / Indian Country Today
http://www.indiancountry.com/content.cfm?id=1096413084

Carrie Dann arrested at Nevada Test Site

MERCURY, Nev. - The ''Divine Strake'' detonation has been halted, but Western Shoshone continued their protest at the Nevada Test Site over Memorial Day weekend to demand respect for Western Shoshone land rights at the site, as stated in the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863.

Carrie Dann, Western Shoshone grandmother, was among 45 people arrested after they crossed the boundary onto the Nevada Test Site in an act of civil disobedience. Security from the site and Nye County sheriff's deputies arrested them and placed them in a holding facility.

''Enough is enough,'' Dann told the crowd before being arrested, which resounded the ''Ya basta!'' (''Enough is enough!'') battle cry of the Zapatistas fighting for indigenous rights in Mexico.

Glenn Morris, attorney, university professor and member of the Colorado Chapter of the American Indian Movement, was arrested. Morris told officers that they were in violation of the Treaty of Ruby Valley and the U.S. Constitution.

''This is treaty land,'' said several Western Shoshone as they were arrested. Non-Western Shoshone received permits to be on the land from the Western Shoshone Nation Council.

Julie Fishel, attorney and advocate for the Western Shoshone Defense Council, and Steven Newcomb, Indian Country Today columnist, were among the 30 women and 15 men arrested.

The women formed a circle in the detention area and sang a warrior song, receiving applause from some officers.

''It doesn't have to be hostile, it can be done in a good way,'' Fishel told Indian Country Today. She said it was the first time she was arrested and as an attorney considered the choice carefully. She said her decision was based on the lawlessness in this country and the United States' refusal to honor decisions of the United Nations, while continuing to violate Western Shoshone and indigenous human rights.

Western Shoshone spiritual leader Corbin Harney, Tom Goldtooth, of the Indigenous Environmental Network, and Tupac Enrique, of Tonatierra in Phoenix, led the day's events, which centered on tradition and respect for mother earth. Several hundred people attended the protest and march to the Nevada Test Site. The 45 arrested were cited and released.

The 700-ton explosion named Divine Strake was halted after Western Shoshone filed a lawsuit in federal court and 42 national and international organizations joined forces, including environmental justice, environmental, political, nonproliferation activists, peace activists and indigenous groups.

The ''Not so Divine Strake Protest'' turned into a victory celebration for Western Shoshone, environmental activists and downwinders May 28 at the Nevada Test Site. Downwinders, those who could be affected by the release of radioactive particles from previous blasts, celebrated in Western states including Utah, Idaho and Montana.

''Now, we'll call it a victory party,'' said Peggy Maze Johnson, executive director of Citizen Alert, the Nevada-based environmental justice organization.

The Nevada Site Office of the National Nuclear Security Administration announced it would withdraw its Finding of No Significant Impact related to the environmental assessment.

''This action is being taken to clarify and provide further information regarding background levels of radiation from global fallout in the vicinity of the Divine Strake experiment. Atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons by several countries in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in the dispersion of radioactive fallout throughout the northern hemisphere,'' the NNSA said.

Attorney Robert Hager earlier assembled a national and international team of attorneys and professionals who filed affidavits on behalf of Western Shoshone plaintiffs to halt it.

''We owe so much to these people, who have such incredible knowledge that when the government saw the strength of their credentials, [it] blinked,'' Hager said.

Two Western Shoshone tribes and individual Western Shoshone Indians and downwinders from Nevada and Utah asked a federal judge in Las Vegas for a second time to stop the huge aboveground explosion. The blast was first scheduled for June 2, then cancelled and rescheduled for June 23 after the lawsuit was filed on April 20.

Radioactive fallout from the blast was predicted that would result in cancers. Children were the most likely victims.

Experts filing documents in the case include Dr. Thomas Fasy, member of the executive committee of the New York City Chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Richard Miller, a toxic exposures expert from Houston, who authored the five-volume U.S. Atlas of Nuclear Fallout, according to a written statement by the plaintiffs.

Fasy wrote that ''to a reasonable degree of medical and scientific certainty ... the Divine Strake explosion would disperse large amounts of radioactive particles into the atmosphere.''

He stated that millions of citizens living downwind are at risk of inhaling particles.

''It is virtually certain that this inhalation of radioactive particles would result in an increased frequency of a variety of cancers in the exposed populations,'' Fasy said. ''Moreover, the increased risk of developing cancers would be borne disproportionately by the children living downwind.''

Miller described the Department of Energy's ''insufficient research regarding the health effects of many of the potential radioisotopes possibly buried in the soil that may be entrained in the dust cloud as a result of the Divine Strake event.''

Miller and Fasy warn that entire communities may be exposed to radioisotopes, including alpha emitters such as americium-241 - an acknowledged carcinogen.

Hager also asked federal District Judge Lloyd George to find that the planned blast would violate the international Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and the congressional ban on the development of new nuclear weapons.

John Burroughs, executive director of the New York City-based Lawyers' Committee on Nuclear Policy, filed a declaration in support.

Burroughs said the Divine Strake test ''reflects a doctrine of war fighting in which nuclear weapons could be used first, against states not possessing nuclear weapons, in an integrated fashion with non-nuclear forces.''

Burroughs said this ''is wholly inconsistent with a 'diminishing role for nuclear weapons in security policies' agreed by the United States in 2000 and a central element of compliance with the disarmament obligation.''

Hager criticized Bechtel, of Nevada, and the federal Departments of Defense and Energy for ''procedural genuflection'' by filing papers in a thinly disguised attempt to comply with environmental administrative procedures.

Hager claimed that the government agencies and Bechtel have engaged in ''junk science'' and have ''intentionally failed'' to conduct proper sampling of the soil, and has asked the court to halt any further ''testing'' by Bechtel and government agencies based on alleged conflict of interest. Nye County Sheriff's Office officials did not return phone calls for comment by press time.

TONATIERRA
PRESS RELEASE
FRIDAY MAY 26, 2006
Contacts:
Tupac Enrique Acosta (602) 466-8367
Edwina Vogan (480) 620-5323

STOP THE STRAKE

Indigenous Nations joined by Peace and Justice Coalition
Mobilize to stop assault on Western Shoshone Nation

Phoenix, AZ- Representatives of Indigenous Nations of Arizona will be joined by Arizona Peace and Justice activists this weekend in sending a support delegation to block the explosion of the mega bomb “Divine Strake” on the Western Shoshone territories of Nevada. The above ground detonation that would result in a health threatening mushroom cloud of possibly radioactive contamination to be released against the public at large is being proposed for the month of June.

The 700 ton explosion planned by the US military forces at the Nevada Test Site is widely seen as a precursor to “bunker buster” bombing attacks against fortified installations in Iran.

The location of this test would be on Western Shoshone land, and would be in direct violation of a recent decision by the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD). In its decision, made public March 10, 2006, the CERD Committee urged the United States to "freeze", "desist" and "stop" actions being taken, or threatened to be taken, against the Western Shoshone Peoples of the Western Shoshone Nation. In its decision, CERD stressed the "nature and urgency" of the Shoshone situation informing the U.S. that it goes "well beyond" the normal reporting process and warrants immediate attention under the Committee's Early Warning and Urgent Action Procedure. (http://www.wsdp.org/un_cerd_wsdp.htm#gov0320)

The CERD decision explicitly cited ongoing weapons testing at the Nevada Test Site as well as efforts to build an unprecedented high-level nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain, NV.

“The proposed Divine Strake is a criminal assault in violation of international law, and a breach of the Peace established in the territory under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico in 1848. If the US wants to affirm the border established by the Treaty, the Peace must be also affirmed. No peace, no border.” said Tupac Enrique Acosta, of the Xicano-Nahuatl Nations.

The delegations from Arizona will join a continental Caravan for Peace and Justice, arriving at the traditional southern doorway of Western Shoshone Nation in Nevada to participate in a direct action of support for the Western Shoshone Nation on May 28, 2006.

www.wsdp.org

###

TONATIERRA Press Release - Stop the Strake

Indigenous Movements: Between Neoliberalism and Leftist Governments
Raúl Zibechi | May 3, 2006

Translated from: Movimientos indígenas: Entre el neoliberalismo y los gobiernos de la izquierda
Translated by: Nick Henry, IRC
http://americas.irc-online.org/am/3257

After scoring resounding victories, the indigenous movements of South America are encountering new challenges, both on an institutional and state level, that they have not been able to answer. Expanding on the wide range of experiences and deepening the exchange between organizations appear to be some of the possible routes that lie ahead.

"Three times we have won and all three times we lost," explains Pablo Dáv alos, Ecuadorian economist and treasurer of the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador (CONAIE, for its Spanish initials). It is not a play on words, but rather the bitter conclusion that the continent's most powerful indigenous movement has arrived at after a decade marked by major victories. It is the lesson learned from the three triumphs scored over the last decade: in 1998, when the indigenous uprising toppled the Abdalá Bucaram government; in 2000, when a vast popular indigenous insurrection forced President Jamil Mahuad to step down; and in 2002, when the CONAIE played a decisive role in the election victory of Lucio Gutiérrez.

Some of these debates came up in the Second Andean-Mesoamerican Conference, "The Indigenous Movement, Resistance, and the Alternative Project," held from March 22-25 in the Bolivian cities of La Paz and El Alto. Academics and indigenous leaders from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Guatemala, Ecuador, Mexico, and Peru attended the conference and discussed the many problems facing movements in the new political context of the region. In spite of the heterogeneous nature of the situations, a few common themes prevailed over the course of the conference, in particular, the relationship between social movements and the State as a consequence of the recent emergence of progressive and leftist governments. At the heart of these debates lies the proposal of the Santa Fe Documents, drawn up by U.S. conservative strategists. The latest considers the indigenous a threat to be fought and neutralized, much as the earlier version warned of the dangers of liberation theology. The empire considers indigenous peoples one of the major problems affecting governance in the region. As subscribers to this assessment, the World Bank and other international organizations have begun financing projects to prevent the formation of collective indigenous actors.

The Peruvian Exception

The case in Peru is among the least known, yet it exemplifies the difficulties movements in adverse situations must face. Peru has a long tradition of resistance and revolt ; it was the epicenter of the struggle of native communities against the Conquest that climaxed in the late 18 th -century with the Túpac Amaru rebellion. But the contemporary indigenous movement there has had great difficulty establishing itself. Speaking at the conference, anthropologist Rodrigo Montoya laid out nine main reasons to explain what he calls "The Peruvian Exception."

He pointed out that in Peru there are two organizations that group together 42 ethnicities of the Amazon, but with deep division between the two. Promoted by the World Bank and the Peruvian government, the two organizations both claim to represent the indigenous while actually "blocking the indigenous movement." The movement has a core of participants "grouped together to negotiate with the United Nations, but they do not fight for self-affirmation." According to Montoya, the World Bank's objective is "to prevent culture and power from joining together." In other words, "It's okay to showcase folkloric culture at expositions and the Lafayette Gallery in Paris, but when culture is working to empower the indigenous, it's considered terrorism." Nevertheless, there does exist an important campesino-indigenous organization, the National Coordination of Peruvian Communities Affected by Mining (CONACAMI), which can be considered an indigenous organization.

Among the reasons for the absence of an indigenous movement in Peru, Montoya points to the "absence of indigenous intellectuals." Túpac Amaru was, in his opinion, "the first and greatest indigenous intellectual, who mastered Spanish, Latin, and Quechua, developed a political project (to rebuild the Inca empire with its capital in Cusco), and for ten years organized the insurrection that followed. But with the repression that ensued, the indigenous intellectuals were all annihilated.

Secondly, there are major contradictions that affect the Peruvian Indian landscape--a large geographical area and the enormously complex universe that is Quechua, a language with 18 different dialects, making it difficult for these mountain-dwellers to understand each other. Montoya concluded: "There is no one Quechuan community, but rather several with historical and social contradictions." This fact complicates both mutual understanding between communities as well as attempts to form an organization to unify them.

Nor has a powerful indigenous bourgeoisie emerged, or at least, one that identifies as such from a cultural perspective, as happened in Ecuador and Bolivia. The nature of the Peruvian government, which is particularly exclusive and racist, probably played a decisive role. A fourth reason is that a powerful, Western-influenced left wing existed in the country that never understood-in spite of the prophetic work of José Carlos Mariátegui in the 1930s-that the campesino is, in reality, an indigenous person fighting not just for land but, above all, for territory.

Fifth, the military government of General Juan Velasco Alvarado (1968-75) carried out major agrarian reforms that were the most important in all of Latin America aside from Cuba. However, he considered the Indian as jut another small farmer and appropriated the main Quechuan symbols by giving them government endorsements. For example, on Peruvian money, Túpac Amaru appeared where the traditional national creole "heroes" had before.

In the sixth place is the anomaly of the Shining Path movement. In Peru, there was a double genocide against indigenous peoples: that of the armed forces, like in other parts of the continent, and that of the Shining ath, participants in a "dirty war" that cost 70,000 people their lives. Montoya concluded, "While in Ecuador they were creating the CONAIE and organizing the indigenous world from the bottom up, in Peru there was a situation where if the Shining Path beheaded 10 people, the army would behead 20." Three quarters of the 70,000 killed in the war were indigenous. Everything that had been gained in the years prior was lost in the 20 years of violence between 1980 and 2000.

Under Alejandro Toledo's government (who assumed indigenous identity), the government began a broad campaign to prevent the emergence of indigenous movements. Toledo's wife, Belgian anthropologist Eliane Karp, created the National Coordination of Andean, Amazon, and Afro-Peruvian Communities (CONAPA), with a $5.5 million budget. The organization was created in a way without precedents on the continent--not only from the top down, but Karp replaced all the principal leaders and raised herself to the position of president of the institution, which she ran in an authoritarian fashion, manipulating native communities.

Finally, Montoya listed two additional elements: "the absence of liberation theology in the world of the downtrodden," unlike the case with Ecuador and Chiapas where there existed a concrete commitment to the poor that facilitated the rise of indigenous actors, and the "absence of committed intellectuals." As an example, he pointed out that of the 600 existing anthropologists in Peru, only eight sympathize with the struggles of the communities. "There is an apolitical anthropological tradition here that proclaims the Indian as marvelous, but believes anthropology is a science, and should not get involved in politics."

In this frankly depressing scene, CONACAMI's presence is noteworthy, since it is the only indigenous, autonomous, and independent organization. Of the 5,600 recognized municipalities in Peru, 3,200 have presented legal complaints against transnational mining corporations, 1,100 are being explored for mining purposes, and some 250 more are actively being mined. From 1992 to the present, the number of square miles under the control of mining corporations has increased from just over 15,000 to almost 100,000. The power of the CONACAMI is situated primarily in those thousand or so communities fighting to maintain their land and prevent their rivers and soil from being contaminated. Mining has become the top export sector in Peru, but as the CONACAMI points out, "It does not contribute to the country's development or to development in its areas of influence." Worse yet, in 2004, six hundred communal landholders were persecuted and tried, and two leaders were assassinated, in a process that criminalized protesting and labeled the smallholders who oppose the mines as terrorists.

Ecuador: The Electoral Dilemma

The last indigenous uprising in Ecuador (launched in March of 2006 and with no end in sight still today) against the aspirations of Alfredo Palacio's provisional government to sign a free trade agreement with the United States, is the first large indigenous mobilization after a long and arduous period of crisis. The organization of this movement was time-consuming and faced several internal difficulties, since the CONAIE had been weakened by its participation in the Lucio Gutierrez government (January-July of 2003), and above all, as a consequence of the double offensive launched against the continent's main indigenous organization.

Since the early 1990s, following the CONAIE's first large uprising it became clear that the indigenous movement had become the key to Ecuador's governance. Several projects were launched to annihilate the organization, a process that reached its peak under Gutierrez's government. The most important and extensive was cooperation for development as expressed in the Project of the Development of the Indigenous and Black Communities of Ecuador (PRODEPINE). During the Second Andean-Mesoamerican Conference, economist Pablo Dávalos, adviser to the CONAIE, analyzed the destructive role these initiatives played: "When the Indians emerged in the '90s, the development projects also began. The development NGOs are terrified at heart of the movement in the province of Chimborazo, where Leonida Proaño had worked--the Ecuadorian force behind liberation theology. Ten years later, that province has been politically destroyed. Chimborazo was a nucleus of indigenous resistance during the '90s and became the object of a political intervention of cooperation projects that transformed the indigenous people into the economically poor. Cooperation for development projects break up solidarity and breed rivalry between communities by creating second-degree organizations that fight over available resources."

Dávalos stated that among specialists, and a good portion of the indigenous leadership, the cooperative work has sparked "the emergence of a technobureaucry of human rights and ethnodevelopment, coopted by the World Bank, which created the PRODEPINE in 1997-98 and budgeted it with $50 million, with the support of anthropologists and sociologists." He adds that Bolivia served as the laboratory for the cooperative experiment, "and from there, they exported it to Ecuador, and Mexico with PRONASOL." Even when well-intentioned individuals work in the cooperation projects, "the idea is to create an elite to serve as an interlocutor for the World Bank and its projects. After a while, you have the community leaders thinking about marketing and how to make more and more money." The main projects consist of education and leadership formation, productive community initiatives, and microfinancing. Just a few years after the creation of the PRODEPINE, the majority of the indigenous movement had been taken over by the NGOs and public officials, to the point where when the CONAIE sponsored mobilizations, "the people at the PRODEPINE would tell community members not to participate because they would lose their credit eligibility," explains Dávalos. After the fall of Gutierrez (2004), the movement pressured for the PRODEPINE not to be renewed and the project is currently paralyzed.

This large-scale offensive against the indigenous movements was crowned by Lucio Gutierrez's administration. Paradoxically, it is worth mentioning that the ex-colonel was elected at the end of 2002 thanks to the help of the CONAIE and large part of the indigenous movement. However, it was under his command that the most devastating events took place: part of the indigenous leadership, above all that of the Amazon, was co-opted by the government, and Gutierrez made it his objective to completely destroy the CONAIE, and in this political context an assassination attempt was made on the president of the organization, which resulted in grave injuries to his son.

During the December 2004 Congress of the CONAIE, where the veteran leader and ex-president Luis Macas was once again elected, Macas began a reconstruction process both on an organizational level and by formulating a project geared toward the long term. He stressed the need to evaluate the work already done and, in particular, the movement's participation in government and state-run institutions that had been a part of the project of forming the Pachakutik Movement in the 90's. According to Dávalos, the indigenous project of creating a plurinational state met with resistance from institutions that date back to colonization and carry on the colonial exclusion of indigenous peoples. "How do we put the political system into a plurinational context?" the economist asks himself. "The political system is articulated in representation and universality, in which the whole world is a citizen. But this is not so for the Indians. In the indigenous world, the liberal discourse homogenizes, while in practice and thought, the indigenous are focused on differences."

This realization gives rise to several questions and uncertainties: "We can show up at the elections, and it's likely that Luis Macas will win the presidency. If that occurs, the same will happen here that happened in Bolivia: the organizational frameworks become frameworks of the State, and then they start to legitimize the State rather than the organization-a liberal State-and then they begin to speak on behalf of the State, and there you have other dynamics and behaviors. So, what do we do?"

For the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, there is no easy solution. Social mobilizations achieved three victories that turned into defeats. In each case, national economic forces, combined with international financial organizations, frustrated the hopes of changing the country by way of a Constituent Assembly (1998), imposing dollarization (2000), and forcing the continuation of neoliberalism by "winning" over the President-elect (2003).

The current debate at the CONAIE is centered on the possibility of creating "another policy." Inspired by the Zapatista's "Other Campaign" in Mexico, the indigenous movement is set to debate the attitude it will adopt toward the elections in October. The objective appears to be to politicize the electoral campaign, which tends to be a media circus, to place on the agenda some of the primary issues affecting the communities: the free trade agreement, the future of water and agriculture, and natural resource issues, among them hydrocarbons, of which Ecuador is a major exporter.

The Bolivian Crossroads

After sponsoring a cycle of protests initiated with the "Water Wars," in Cochabamba in the year 2000, and continuing with the "Natural Gas Wars" of 2003 and 2005 throughout the country, Bolivian social movements have managed to put the first indigenous man in the Presidential office: Evo Morales. There are two issues at the top of the movement's priorities: nationalization of resources, particularly natural gas, and the convocation of a Constituent Assembly to decolonize the State.

Bolivia still has a colonial government: while 70% of the population is Quechua, Aymara, or Guarani (the most numerous ethnic groups), the government is controlled by a small white and mestizo majority. In the last few years, a small indigenous bloc took root in Congress (they are now the majority), but the most important positions in the Department of Justice and the State apparatus have continued to be held by white politicians, and public officials have continued to be exclusively white and mestizo. As such, the immense majority perceives the State as something foreign and hostile. A Constituent Assembly would be an opportunity to democratize the colonial institutions of Bolivia in such a way that all ethnicities, languages, and customs have equal standing.

However, barely two months into the new term, the people's two biggest hopes appear to be en route to frustration. Felipe Quispe, leader of the campesino center CSUTCB, said during the Second Conference, "Today I cannot be content or happy about the fact that we have an Indian leader in the Presidential Palace because what we are concerned about is changing the system." He is certain the Morales administration will not accomplish the three most important demands: "He is not going to nationalize natural gas and petroleum, rescind the neoliberal policies that gave rise to privatization and educational reform, or give us our land back."

Quispe is a radical leader who ran for president on the Indigenous Pachakutik Movement (MIP) ticket, garnering only 2% of the vote. But he is not the only skeptic. Perhaps the most controversial move of the new government was the way it convoked the Constituent Assembly. The law to call for the Assembly was negotiated with rightwing parties, and the result has drawn much criticism and opposition from the National Advisory of Ayllus and Markas of the Qullasuyu and the Bolivian Workers' Center. In his January 22 nd inaugural address, Evo Morales declared, "We want a Constituent Assembly that is refoundational, not just constitutional reform." According to many analysts, under the convocation only 20% of the current Constitution can be changed, and that would occur only in the best of cases.

The rules of the game for electing the Assembly to be instituted on August 6 th call for the election of three representatives for each of the country's 70 districts: two for the majority and one for the minority, even if the minority manages to get, for example, only 10% of the votes. Moreover, each of the nine provinces will elect five representatives: two for the majority, and up to three from minority parties, so long as they obtain at least 5% of the vote. Under this system, even in the impossible event that the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS)-Morales's party-manages to win every district, it will never garner the two-thirds majority necessary for modifying the current Constitution. Thus, the MAS will have to strike an agreement with the opposition even if it has an absolute majority of votes. An article in the newspaper El Juguete Rabioso maintains that the government "has put chains on making change" and that the most likely outcome is that "the Constituent Assembly will be at the service of the powerful with the campesinos as adornment." An equally important fact is that the time periods stipulated in the convocation are such that the movements cannot present themselves as such, but must register their candidates in the party lists.

Even from sectors closely tied to the government, the criticism has been harsh. Raul Prada, Department of Foreign Relations adviser, assures, "The Assembly that has been convoked is not constituent because it will not change the state." He adds that the structure of the convocation "has limited its tasks to editing and reforming," thereby leaving behind the true objective of a Constituent Assembly: "to found a new state" and "alter the institutional map, which is to say, change the powers that be." Directly polemicizing with Vice-President Alvaro Garcia Linera, Prada criticizes what he considers "an extreme tepidness on the part of the government, tied down by its own indecision, lost in its own labyrinth, in a post-electoral landscape where the prior economic forces are poised to recuperate their lost ground at the cost of participative democracy and the hope of a people who took a chance by betting on change."

We can return to the beginning and ask ourselves, along with Dávalos, "How is it that the powerful are able to convert defeat into triumph?" It makes little sense to lay blame on them, whether they are the powerful of a particular country, or the ones who run the world. At the end of the day, they are there to protect their interests. Perhaps, as the adviser of the CONAIE points out, the social forces believed that change consisted of winning at the polls; they did not give sufficient weight to the necessity of "decolonizing democracy," which has been kidnapped in most parts of South American by "the market." Gaining ground in its place is the necessity to work in another manner: from below, weaving solid bonds that do not dissolve under political and electoral marketing.

Translated for the IRC Americas Program by Nick Henry, IRC.
Raúl Zibechi is a member of the Editorial Board of the weekly Brecha in Montevideo, professor and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and advisor to several social groups. He is a monthly contributor to the IRC Americas Program (www.americaspolicy.org).

• Berger, Pablo, "Conacami: una organización nacional enfrentando a las multinacionales mineras", en Minkandina, http://www.choike.org.
• Bolpress, prensa boliviana, http://www.bolpress.com.
• Conaie: http://www.conaie.org.
• El Juguete Rabioso, magazine, La Paz, No. 149, March, 19, 2006,
• http://www.eljugueterabioso.org.
• Escárzaga, Fabiola and Gutiérrez, Raquel (coords.) Movimiento indígena en América Latina: resistencia y proyecto alternativo, Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, México, 2005. Montoya Rojas, Rodrigo De la utopía andina al socialismo mágico, Instituto Nacional de Cultura, Cusco, 2005. Willanakuy, magazine of Conacami, No. 21, enero de 2004

Tom Hayden: Who Are You Calling an Immigrant?

"WE DIDN'T CROSS THE BORDER, THE BORDER CROSSED US" From a protest sign laid out on the lawn of Los Angeles City Hall during the May Day protest march.

By Tom Hayden
www.truthdig.com/report/item/20060502_tom_hayden_immigrant/#8674

I wore the multicolored Aymaran flag of Bolivia to the May Day march in Los Angeles, the same day that Evo Morales, the first indigenous president of Bolivia, nationalized the oil and gas fields. It seemed right to recognize the reappearance of the indigenous in the Americas. I gazed at Marcos Aguilar, one of the UCLA hunger strikers for Chicano studies in 1993. Now he stood bare-skinned and feathered, leading a traditional dance below the edifice of the Los Angeles Times. Rather than becoming assimilated into gringotopia, he was forcing the reverse, the assimilation of the Machiavellians into the new reality of L.A. Another hunger striker from those days, Cindy Montanez, was chairing the state Assembly’s rules committee. Another UCLA student, a beneficiary of ’ 60s outreach programs, was mayor of the city. 

Contrary to most mainstream commentary, these protests were part of a continuous social movement going back many decades, even centuries. And yet the commentators, especially on the national level, once again summoned the stereotype of the lazy Mexican, the sleeping giant awakening. For years it was convenient to blame apathy and low participation rates on the Mexican-Americans and other Latinos, ignoring the racial exclusion that prevailed east of the Los Angeles River. In 1994, the same “sleeping giant” arose against Pete Wilson’s Proposition 187. It previously awoke in the 1968 high school “blowouts,” the 1968-69 Chicano moratorium and the farmworker boycotts, which were the largest in history, and, in an earlier generation, the giant awoke in the “Zoot Suit Riots” and Ed Roybal’s winning campaign for City Council. The giant never had time to sleep at all. 

In the Great Depression, in the lifetimes of the parents and grandparents of today’s students, up to 600,000 Mexicans, one-third of the entire U.S. Mexican population, many of them born in the United States, were deported with their children back to Mexico, their labor no longer needed. 

Out of nowhere?

There is a frightening gap between the white perception of this 50-year trauma of deportation and the experience of Mexicans and other immigrants, like the Salvadorans who were driven here by the U.S.-backed civil wars of the 1970s. Somewhere between amnesia and a self-induced lobotomy, the gap needs to be closed in the dialogue that may come of these historic protests. The mere passage of time may erase white memories and guilt, and induce acceptance among Mexicans, but it does not legitimize the occupation itself. The wound will not disappear under American flags, searchlights and border walls. 

The fundamental issue still shaping attitudes down to the present is this: Either the Mexicans (and other Latinos) are immigrants to a country called the United States or the U.S. is a Machiavellian power that denies occupying one-half of Mexico for 156 years. During the 1846-48 war against Mexico, at least 50,000 Mexicans died. The fighting took place across many cities considered pure-bred American today; in Los Angeles, a revolt temporarily drove out the U.S. Army. Guerrilla resistance by Mexican fighters left a mythic legacy of those like Joaquin Murrieta and Tiburcio Vasquez, names still alive among Mexican-American students today. Meanwhile, The New York Times was declaring in 1860: “ The Mexicans, ignorant and degraded as they are, [should welcome a system] founded on free trade and the right of colonization so that, after a few years of pupilege, the Mexican state would be incorporated into the Union under the same conditions as the original colonies.”

After unilaterally annexing Texas in 1845, despite massive protests, the U.S. president sent troops 100 miles into what previously was Mexican land. When the Mexicans retaliated, the U.S. declared war on the pretext that Americans had been attacked on American soil. When it ended, the U.S. took 51% of Mexico’s land, including California, where the discovery of gold had been kept secret from Mexican negotiators. At least 100,000 Mexicans and an additional 200,000 indigenous people lived on those lands. Ever since, those people and their descendants have lived in a split-consciousness similar to that of African-Americans described in W.E.B. DuBois’ “The Souls of Black Folk.” Each new generation of immigrants fuels that consciousness all over again. 

Under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the imposed settlement of the 1846-48 war, the inhabitants of the occupied territories were granted legal, political, educational and cultural rights as citizens, not as immigrants. Some of the earliest official documents of California were required under the treaty to be printed in Spanish and English. This treaty, which was unenforced, became the basis for later movements stretching into the 1960s, movements that gave the Southwest an Aztec name (Aztlan) and demanded the return of former land grants. It was not unlike Radical Reconstruction, the period after the Civil War when Gen. Sherman’s official promise of “forty acres and a mule” was withdrawn. 

Today’s demonstrations are not demanding implementation of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Modern Mexican-Americans have made the legalization of undocumented workers as United States citizens their consensus demand. But there re mains an unspoken difference between two states of mind regarding the meaning of the border. In every generation, immigrant workers and youth have claimed their American rights without abandoning the memory of their deeper historical ones. 

A significant number of white Americans, especially among the elites, still hold to nativist definitions of American identity, in contrast to those multinational corporations that tend to be more interested in cheap foreign labor than in keeping American white.

Conservative journals like the American Outlook publish articles glorifying “ the Anglosphere” as the standard of globalization (March-April 2001). Kevin Phillips is quoted in the article as still longing for an American culture whose “core thought is a kind of English revivalism.” Regarding this month’s demonstrations, the black neoconservative Thomas Sowell has criticized the “ demanding” and “threatening” tone of “people who want their own turf on American soil…” (L.A. Daily News, April 29, 2006). 

No one lends an Ivy League luster to the Minuteman Mentality more than Harvard University professor Samuel Huntington. A proud “Anglo-Protestant,” Huntington previously advocated the “forced urbanization” of the Vietnamese peasantry into a “Honda culture” as a formula for ending the nationalist uprising. In the ’70s, he complained that an “excess of democracy” threatened Western authorities. More recently, he formulated the strident doctrine of “the clash of civilizations,” decreeing that Islamic culture is incompatible with democratic civilization. Finally, he has weighed in on “The Hispanic Challenge,” arguing that Latino immigration is “a major potential threat to the cultural and possibly political integrity of the United States” (in Foreign Policy, March-April 2006). Huntington argues that Mexican-Americans are too close to their traditional culture to become assimilated as patriotic Americans. By this he means, of course, that they cannot become imitation WASPs, whose identity he sees as basic to the American nation. For Huntington, assimilation seems to mean submission and disappearance into the master culture, a viewpoint still held by many. We defeated you, and now you should become like us. 

Largely forgotten in the current debate, too, are those among the elites who still consider Mexico itself a strategic long-term threat. The late Caspar Weinberger, a secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan, wrote in 1998 of planning for a theoretical “next war” against Mexico, opting for the military option in case “it becomes necessary to go down in and try to catch [a] rebel leader in Mexico and restore democratic rule to Mexico” (interview with “Chuck Baldwin Live,” Feb. 17, 1998). The Harvard historian of Chiapas, John Womack, has written that in the 1990s “the US government, in particular the Defense Department … wanted ‘low-intensity’ warfare in Mexico” (“Rebellion in Chiapas,” Harvard, 1999). 

But the U.S. has historically been the destabilizing force in Mexico, most recently with the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which has flooded the country with corn and other products and replaced indigenous manufacturing with the maquiladora economy, thus displacing at least hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, many of whom seek survival in el norte. Perpetuating the cycle is absolutely crucial to neo-liberal economics. But it also perpetually stimulates rebelliousness, in fact and memory, among those who take to U.S. streets today, and who shortly will be the urban majority in a new America.

As people of color, mainly immigrants, edge closer to majority status in key states, their relatives to the south are becoming nationalist, populist majorities in country after country, with interests that sharply conflict with the disintegrating U.S. Monroe Doctrine of 1823. If the populist mayor of Mexico City is elected president of Mexico this fall, NAFTA itself will die or be re-negotiated. This is the first time in many decades that the interests of Latinos in the U.S. are closely converging with the governments and people of the nations of the south. As seen even in the recent international baseball championships, the willingness of America’s major league Latino players to join the lineups of their homelands shows the fluid nature of borders and solidarity. A policy beyond the Monroe Doctrine will have to be crafted for the United States, with Latinos in the lead. As Evo Morales of Bolivia is suggesting, “another annexation is possible,” the annexation of the United States into peaceful coexistence with Latin America. 

Some would argue that America must simply follow the path of previous immigrant generations, like my Famine Irish ancestors. It is true that the slum-dwelling Irish, Jews and Italians rose in time to the middle class, and the same future may lie ahead for the new immigrants. We can see signs of the past in the growing ranks of Latino trade unionists and mayors and other politicians. But the difference in the histories is race and class. If neo-liberalism has failed to widen the American middle class since 1973, how will it expand to provide decent jobs for the aspiring immigrants in today’s underclass? Is there another New Deal just over the horizon, or a hardening defense of the status quo? 

Huntington’s Anglosphere is dying, if only through demographics. It is a matter of time--of when, not whether. The newcomers have neither the need nor the capacity to assimilate into a declining Anglosphere. They will remain multicultural of necessity, the hybrid multitude arising from the depths of empire and its resistance. The real question is how the rest of America, the rest of us, can assimilate and find belonging within all the Americas, where so many flags are fluttering in the gusts of self-determination.

www.cumbrecontinentalindigena.org
www.tonatierra.org

Danza Azteca

According to the traditional teachings of the Nican Tlacah, the Indigenous Peoples of the Nahuatl Nations, all of humanity shares equally in the warmth of Father Sun, and the sacred sustenance from Mother Earth.  Besides being a scientific formula written in cultural terms, this relationship serves as TEOXICALLI : a nest for the development of our collective human awareness, one which allows for the emergence of understanding, respect, harmony, and peace.

At the horizon of a new day, a New Sun,  Danza Azteca Huehuecoyotzin  brings these traditional teachings forward upon the celebration of 5 de Mayo. More than just a historical commemoration of the Battle of Puebla, Mexico in 1862 the indigenous ceremonies related to 5 de Mayo have an ancient astronomical significance. It is during these days celebrated annually by the Indigenous Nations of Mexico, that a certain constellation gains prominence over the southern horizon in Anahuac for the first time since winter -- the Southern Cross, also known as the constellation of the Confederation of the Condor, Tawantinsuyo.

As members of the Indigenous Nations of the Continental Confederacy of the Eagle and the Condor, El 5 de Mayo is thus also a commemoration of the ancient Treaty between the North and the South which mutually binds us to this day as Nations of the Indigenous Peoples of this continent Abya Yala and the world.

On August the 12th, 1521, the traditional council of the Confederation of Anahuak issued a mandate for the future generations from the center of Mexico, in Tenochtitlan.  Nearly five hundred years later, the traditional circle of families known as HUEHUECOYOTZIN  continue to perpetuate this powerful call to destiny and harmony for all humanity, known as the Nahuatilamatl.  The Huehuecoytzin is a constellation of families living here in the Valley of the Sun who practice this discipline and teachings of the Mexicayotl, a contemporary expression of the way of life of the Nican Tlacah, the Indigenous Peoples of Mexico Izkalotlan, Aztlan and Cemanahuak.

The Zacapoaxtla Battalion and the Battle of 5 de Mayo, 1862  

Originating from settlements of the Indigenous Nations of the Nahuas, Chichimecas and Toltecas, the region known as Zacapoaxtla is recognized for providing the majority of fighters at the Battle of 5 de Mayo in 1862. These some 4,000 Indigenous Peoples faced the bayonets and rifles of the 8,000 man French Army armed only with only machetes and valor.  They emerged victorious, and left the legacy of one of the most significant military victories by the Indigenous Peoples of the continent against those who would subjugate us to colonization.

The French were arrogant and Eurocentric in their thinking, and were eventually deported back to Europe.  Today we face the same battle, and must recall the same courage as in 1862.  But today our weapons are not instruments of destruction and death.  Today we are called to battle not in a military campaign, but against the doctrines of cultural supremacy, racism and fear that would deny the reality of our common humanity that we share with each and all.

Today our weapons are our Principles: Respect, Dignity, Cultural Self Determination and EDUCATION, as we advance in the Battle against Ignorance, the Battle of 5 de Mayo!

!La Batalla de 5 de Mayo es todos los Dias!

Links:
http://www.carnaval.com/cinco/cinco_history.htm
Zacapoaxtla: símbolo del heroísmo de la Sierra Norte de Puebla
Zacapoaxtla: a symbol of heroism in Puebla's Sierra Norte
http://www.pbs.org/kpbs/theborder/history/timeline/10.html
www.tonatierra.org
http://www.cumbrecontinentalindigena.org

NAHUACALLI
Embassy of the Indigenous Peoples
April 28, 2006

  Nohuanyolqueh,  

We are called by conscience to respond to a blatant Act of War about to be launched against the Western Shoshone Nation in violation of the 1863 Treaty of Ruby Valley on June 2nd by the present Bush administration, detonating a health threatening mushroom cloud of possibly radioactive contamination to be released against the public at large, said Act of War to be committed behind the political smoke screens of centuries of regime change across the territory and the continent.

http://www.wsdp.org/divine_strake_alert.htm 

As representatives of the Continental Confederation of the Eagle and the Condor, the Indigenous Nations and Pueblos of Tlahtokan Aztlan hereby reaffirm our mutual commitment under our Treaty of Teotihuacan, to Defend the Western Shoshone Nation Peoples and Territories as a sacred obligation and responsibility to safeguard Mother Earth, our traditions, our cultures and our life ways for our children, our youth and the generations yet unborn.

http://www.tonatierra.org/tlahtokan_aztlan.html 

Further, we now hereby put on notice both governments of the US and the Republic of Mexico that such an Act of War, the proposed "Divine Strake" testing  at the Nevada Test Site on June 2nd shall not only be a blatant act of violation against the decision on May 10th, 2006 by  United Nations Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) which found the United States in violation of recognized fundamental human rights standards and international law, ordering the United States to “freeze”, “desist” and “stop” their activities on Western Shoshone land, (http://www.wsdp.org/un_cerd_wsdp.htm#gov0320) but yet further, such Act of War shall be considered a breach of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo US-Mexico 1848, to wit:

ARTICLE I
There shall be firm and universal peace between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic, and between their respective countries, territories, cities, towns, and people, without exception of places or persons.

http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/diplomacy/mexico/guadhida.htm 

For clarification, the Western Shoshone Nation never relinquished their powers of representation or jurisdiction as Indigenous Peoples of Newe Sogobia (Western Shoshone homelands) to the Governments of Spain, or that of the Republic of Mexico of 1848.  Thus, any potential land right acquired by the US government under provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in the territories described is not one of title, but only a franchise to pursue dominion over the land rights and proprietary interests held through the inherent powers in perpetuity of the Nations of the Indigenous Peoples.  

Therefore, as declared with consensus at the Continental Summit of Indigenous Nations Pueblos and Organizations held in the Mapuche Nation Territories of Mar de Plata [Argentina] November 2-4, 2005:   ( http://www.cumbrecontinentalindigena.org/)  

Actions of Implementation
•           ACTION:  To implement the initiatives of DECOLONIZATION, at the dimension of our continent Abya Yala, obligated by the procedures under international law indicated by resolutions of the United Nations General Assembly 1514 and 1541, among others; and
•           ACTION:  To call for the commitment of support from the social justice movements of the continent for the global campaign of the Indigenous Peoples in demand of annulment of the Papal Bull Inter Cetera of 1493 (Doctrine of Discovery);  

We now call for a continental Act of Discovery, in the form of a Caravan for Peace and Justice, arriving at the traditional southern doorway of New Sogobia by May 28, 2006. And that such caravan for Peace and Justice, empowered by the Nelhuayotl Nican Tlacah, the Traditional Ways of Life of the Indigenous Peoples, shall be instructed to search in their life journeys for the Spirit of Truth as expressed in reciprocity and respect for the Community Ecology of our common humanity and with our Sacred Mother Earth, in accord with the Free, Prior and Informed Consent of the Indigenous Peoples unto the future generations.   

  Signed,   

Tupac Enrique Acosta, Yaotachcauh
Tlahtokan Nahuacalli   

 Stop the Strake - Continental Call for Action - NAHUACALLI