Check out this brief news story:

http://www.latinamericanpost.com/index.php?mod=seccion&secc=38&conn=6558

Well I’m a little skeptical to weather or not this is progress or not.

I mean I am happy for the indigenous people of Peru and I really hope this new law will help them when oil and mining companies try to destroy their land. But who knows if it will actually help. I suppose the companies will be held more responsible now, which is great. This article got me thinking again about the differences between rights, freedoms and laws. There’s a UN Declaration on the rights of Indigenous Peoples so shouldn’t that already protect their rights? Obviously not so they need their own laws to do so.  I guess another one of the reasons these declarations of rights don’t work, aside from the fact that people don’t read them or know they exist, is that they are so far removed from people’s daily lives that state laws are required to ensure the safety of people’s rights.   

However, I can’t help but be cynical and wonder how long it is until President Ollanta Humala life is threatened, or worse? I’m sure investors of mining corporations are not happy with these types of laws and will be putting pressure on the Peruvian government to let them come into the country and do and ruin whatever is necessary to jmake a buck.  So again, while I feel like this kind of news is so surprisingly wonderful, I am waiting for some backlash or some “accident” to happen. It makes me glad to think that these rights might actually be respected and protected.

While the law does not give indigenous people the right to veto the future “economic possibilties”, at the very least thier voices will be heard now. Hopefully foreign companies won’t repeat past mistakes and will listen to the indeigenous voices.

Article: Colombia: Constitutional court opens way for restitution for rights to Las Pavas community

Accessed from the Latin America bureau on September 25th,2011

It is welcoming news to read an article in which the “small guys” turn out to be the winners against large industrial companies. This article deals with the community of peasents in Las Pavas who for almost a decade have had no guarenteed aceess to their land and have been forcefully evicted from it. Finally with some outside help they have managed to make a claim to their land and the contitutional court has deemed their eviction illegal, ordering that the Columbian government grant them full land rights.

As the article points out this has positive benefits not only for the communities involved but also for the surrounding ecosystems. The group that sought to buy up their land in 2006 (a subsidiary of the DAABON group) planned on turning it into a palm oil mono-plantation. As much of the surrounding environment is wetlands and forests this would have led to deforestation and destruction of the wetlands. I think this allows us to see the interconnection of human rights,land rights and environmental conservation.The communities that have been managing these ecosystems for decades have a vested interest in preserving them as they derive much of their food,fodder,medicine,firewood etc from them. This however is only possible if they are guaranteed access to these lands. We can only hope that the Columbian government understands this as well and grants the farmers in the community of Las Pavas full ownership of these lands.

I am sharing the links to the Organization of American States’ page on Human Rights: 

http://www.oas.org/en/topics/human_rights.asp

and the page on “What is Inter-American Commission on Human Rights [Commission Internacional de Derechos Humanos]?” : 

http://www.cidh.oas.org/what.htm

These serve to show the involvement of Latin American countries in establishing a Legal System/Treaty for Human Rights based in the western hemisphere. 

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/09/2011913141540508756.html

This article describes how left leaning parties are consistently winning in Latin American Elections. However, Indigenous Rights are still a major issue that is seeming to be ignored. For instance, in Peru, Indigenous people are protesting how the government has given mining permits to a Canadian company for rights to mine at Lake Titicaca. Which is an infringement on their rights to land and possibly on their rights to clean water.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/world/americas/venezuela-victory-for-a-dissident.html

Here’s a New York Times article about a ruling by a human rights court in Latin America to allow for an opposition opponent to run in the presidential elections in Venezuela in 2012. While Chavez can be a progressive man of the people, his desire to be a benevolent dictator is pretty anachronistic in this day and age, especially in the midst of the demise of dictatorships in the Arab Spring.

Article by Time Harvey, 2 Mar 2011, TheTyee.ca

http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2011/03/02/SacredMountain/.

This makes no sense. How is it possible that a foreign-owned Canadian company looks at Mexico and says: “Hey, there is this random piece of land in that has a billion and a half dollars worth of silver under the ground. We can go in, pollute their water system, annihilate their aquifer, displace the communities, wipe out the third most biodiverse ecosystem in the world, and destroy the landscape in such a way that it will be unrecognizable for multiple centuries? Oh yeah..and uh..this place is coincidently on a reserve and is this random Indian tribes holiest place so they are kinda pissed off at us (but come’ on, it’s Mexico I mean, we as a large Canadian can rest assured that the Mexican government will put our economic interests before their own peoples legal, political, social and environmental interests) . The profits will be going to us anyway and best off all, thanks to those Free Trade Agreements we will not really be held responsible for any of the political, human or environmental injustices that will occur which is awesome cause let’s face it; whew! We know the shit that went down with that other mining company, did you hear about the guy that almost was almost beaten to death by the mine employees, yeah the guy that was protesting the mine… or that massive toxic leak that caused permanent mental damage in all the children under five in a nearby village….cheesh, that was some bad PR …” ?

What?

Really, in what kind of a world do we live in? Where human rights abuses and environmental destruction are foreseen in the project and the project can still continue? Where it is more certain than not that toxic chemicals will be leached into the water systems of the surrounding communities that will not even profit from this mine but will most like suffer from the consequences that sudden and abrupt change in the local economy, an influx of foreign influence and environmental degradation bring with it? This case contains abuse against human rights on so many levels. This mine will decrease access to the most fundamental requirement for human life: water. It is taking away a cultures right to practice religion freely and imposing an extremely imperialistic worldview on their culture. In accordance with Mexican law they have the right, as a minority with vested interest in the reserve, to be consulted. Then there is the ecological balance law, the law for handling of toxic substances and many more which have been outlined in the 2010 Declaration in Defence of Wirikuta. Despite this and fully with this knowledge the Vancouver based mining company is set to start an “aggressive drilling and exploration program” this year.

People have rights, and a right to fight for their rights in any way they can. I think the concept of human rights is often understood in a very formal way, as if writing them down on a piece of paper matters. It doesn’t; power is held by those that supplied the paper. It is held by the ones that developed the idea of a formalized social contract and made people think that it was therefore more binding than what they knew in their hearts. I am all for a social contract, don’t get me wrong and maybe formalizations of that contract are necessary. But let’s not get distracted by writing down  on paper what in theory should or should not be a right. Let’s remember why we have this social contract, why these rights are important and shouldn’t be broken. Let’s make this life long, distinguished and beautiful.

If you want to learn more about this issue, there is a silent auction fundraiser and information session at the Anza Club on October 13^th at 8pm that will show a documentary and have a discussion session with a key Huichol leader.

http://www.yale.edu/cpworkshop/papers/Steele.pdf

As Steele argues in the article one of the common concerns of humanitarian scholarship tends to be on what produces the displacement and wether if is voluntary or involuntary, with long and imbricated debates over the pertinence of one or another term for appropriately discuss the nature of the phenomenon. However, how people are displaced is also a relevant question that needs to be asked. Not only because the patters of community building are necessarily different from rural to urban communities, but also because it is important to see how those new communities that are formed could also become enclaves or continuations of the conflict that originated the displacement, or if on the other hand, they are simply a new beginning, for the communities that resettle.

 

 

 

http://www.internal-displacement.org/8025708F004BE3B1/(httpInfoFiles)/045269C6918FD857802570B50046F054/$file/Colombia+-February+2004.pdf

The Secret Policeman's Ball is back. After a hiatus of over fifteen years, the comic fundraiser for Amnesty International is returning.

The event was first organized in 1976, as human rights were high on the international agenda, thanks in large part to a series of military takeovers in the Southern Cone (Chile, 1973; Uruguay, 1973; Argentina, 1976).

In "Chase Heads Policeman's Ball Bill", the BBC quotes Amnesty's UK director Kate Allen as saying "The reason we brought back The Secret Policeman's Ball is that it's never been more important to stand up for human rights. They are coming under threat in ways that we hadn't anticipated."

I take the return of this event as yet another sign both of a new era of rights discourse, and also of the distance between this era and the previous one.

We're no longer, in fact, in an era of secret policemen, the leaden-footed apparatchiks of the Eastern Bloc or the national security state that could be so easily parodied by Monty Python et al. (A parody that no doubt drew on second world war folk memory, in which the dictator's genitalia are offered up for derision.)

But what era are we in? And why did the previous rights discourse fail, it seems, so disastrously to anticipate it?