Author: thefreeonline

Dec 3, 21

Filed under: Featured, Indigenous, Interviews, Mexico, Political Prisoners—Scott Campbell

La versión original de esta entrevista en español puede encontrarse aquí.

The following is an interview with Indigenous political prisoner José Antonio Arreola Jiménez, one of three political prisoners from the P’urhépecha community of Nahuatzen, Michoacán, currently serving seven-year sentences based on trumped-up charges. The interview was conducted in late November by IGD contributor Scott Campbell.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little about yourself?

Yes, my name is José Antonio Arreola Jiménez. I’m from the Indigenous community of Nahuatzen, Michoacán. Nahuatzen is an Indigenous community nestled in the heart of the Meseta Purépecha. I have my wife and five children.

Can you share with us some details about Nahuatzen, its struggle, and your role in that struggle?

The struggle in Nahuatzen began in 2015, when the last municipal president was imposed on us by the state government, by [then-governor] Silvano Aureoles Conejo. Then, this Miguel Prado Morales, which is his name, arrived with more than twenty or thirty armed individuals from outside the community, claiming to be his private police, his bodyguard. We, as community members, thought this was bad, because within the town there is no need to bring weapons, we’re not people who fight, we’re not armed people. We’re working people, peaceful people. So that was, more than anything else, the main issue.

Ecuador’s constitutional court has blocked plans to mine copper and gold in Los Cedros, a protected cloud forest, ruling that the plans violate the rights of nature.

“This is a historic victory in favor of nature,” Natalia Greene of the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature said in a statement. “This sets a great juridical precedent to continue with other threatened protected forests.”

Ecuador’s national mining company, Enami EP, holds mining rights in two-thirds of the reserve, which is home to 178 threatened or near-threatened species, including the the vulnerable white-headed capuchin, the endangered mantled howler monkey, and the critically endangered brown-headed spider monkey.

“If mining started in Los Cedros, species would go extinct, without a doubt,” said Roo Vandegrift, a biologist at the University of Oregon, told Mongabay.

In 2018, the government of Cotacachi, an Ecuadorian canton that is home to 43 Indigenous communities, challenged the project, winning in a provincial court. Enami appealed to Ecuador’s highest court, which upheld the ruling Monday.

In its decision, the high court said that the government did not provide the “scientific evidence necessary to avoid and mitigate serious and irreversible damage to species and ecosystems, and therefore, to the rights of nature, to the water and a healthy and balanced environment.” The ruling effectively cancels all mining concessions and environmental and water permits.

“Policy frameworks that place humans in context as a part of nature … rather than placing humans as above, or apart from, nature, will be a necessary part of addressing the serious environmental issues that our planet is facing,” Mika Peck, a senior lecturer in biology at the University of Sussex, told The Guardian.

“This ruling is as important to nature as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man were to our own species.”

Spanish State, Opinión / by Manuel Almisas Albéndiz translation TheFreeOnline

Every time the workers’ struggle in Cádiz resorts to the barricades, … as happened a few days ago with the Metal proletariat, the oldest of the place immediately remember the Astilleros struggles of 1977 and how from the rooftops of the houses of the popular neighborhoods Tables, chairs, flowerpots,… and even household appliances were thrown at the riot control. But that was not news.

Already in December 1868, during the Cádiz Commune, the town harassed the government troops by throwing all kinds of objects from the rooftops. This can be seen in the detail of the engraving of the struggles in the barricades of the San Juan neighborhood (Cádiz), with the cathedral and the church of Santiago in the background1. Cádiz has 3,000 years of history, and almost as many of workers’ and revolutionary struggle (exaggerating, of course …).

It may seem almost a sacrilege to compare what happened in Cádiz on December 5, 6 and 7, 1868 with the mythical Paris Commune from March to May 1871, but only the brevity of those events and the enormous lack of information can hide their revolutionary characteristics that marked an entire era. Historiography has been in charge of underlining the enormous casualties of the army and the people, the numerous barricades (up to 185 without counting others of lesser importance!)