Mesosmerica

From Mesoamerican Movement Against Mining translated by Earth First! Journal - October 3, 2017

Just like the past five years in the Syrian Valley in Honduras, the communities, peoples and organizations that make up M4 have met from September 22 to 25 in the City of San José in Costa Rica to recognize and reaffirm ourselves in the struggle against the extractive mining model.

Since then, we confirm that the extractive mining model has been imposed as the megaproject with the greatest territorial impact and enslavement of human rights, land grabbing and destruction of Mother Earth in Latin America.

During the days of the Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4) meetiing, representatives of 13 countries (Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Haiti, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Sierra Leone, United States), agreed hat mining activity in our territories has advanced under the protection of politicians and technocrats who are poorly informed or ineffective, if not corrupted, by the imposition of corporate interests on the collective interest, by personal appetites and complicit silences. In this sense, we consider that mining in our territories is the result of a deficit democratic model that, operating under the logic that having power is to be right, inevitably places the people in a situation of vulnerability. We have the clarity to affirm and denounce that mining would not be possible without an institutional framework that brings the cause of a development model that – through the irrational extraction of natural common goods – favors the logic of reproduction, accumulation and centralization of capital.

To achieve their productivity goals, mining companies outsource their costs by taking advantage of the permissiveness of legislation and government corruption. The mining companies take advantage of the poverty of the people and the absence of alternatives, which usually facilitates the exploitation of labor and nature. Mining corporations get cheap or free kickbacks and channel their energies into the political lobby. This process is reinforced by international financial institutions and governments from the Global North, who, through “structural adjustment measures”, force countries such as ours to stimulate exports of what they often call “natural resources” through tax exemptions and other financial incentives.

It is this logic of accumulation by dispossession that has led us to face one of the most severe crises of violations of human rights in Latin America. The M4, its members and its organizations have been victims of extractive violence. On March 3, 2016, in Honduras, as part of the exchanges and alliances facilitated by our movement, our comrade Berta Caceres, leader of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), was murdered; in the same episode, Mexican comrade Gustavo Castro, a Latin American referent of the social movement for the defense of land and territory and the principal promoter and promoter of the Mesoamerican Movement against the Extractive Mining Model (M4), was wounded and, as a victim , criminalized by the government of Honduras. However, we are standing, we exist because we resist.