CounterVortex

EMPIRES OF GOLD

Colombian Extractivism Today

by Luke Finn, NACLA

Before there was Colombia, there was the extractive industry.

The legend of El Dorado stems from a Spaniard, Juan Rodriguez Freyle, watching a High Priest of the Muisca getting covered in gold dust and jumping in Lake Guatavita, near Bogotá, in a religious ceremony that makes the Pope's big hat and incense-burning look fairly underwhelming. Naturally, the Spanish saw this profligacy as wrongheaded veneration of the Sun God Sue, decided that they themselves were far better placed to use all the gold responsibly, and set about destroying the complex societies that had flourished in Colombia prior.

Legends of cities of gold (La Ciudad Blanca, the Seven Cities of Cibola) drove men who nowadays would rightly be considered genocidaires (or go-getting entrepreneurs in the global commodities market) across the Atlantic, far from their families, to an uncertain fate—an alien environment full of strange gods, beautiful birds, jeweled beetles. The Spanish Empire was built on this gold (and other commodities they could "extract," worked by the stolen people of another ravaged continent.) The Muisca did less well.

Such was the conquest of the New World, and the Spanish didn't know the half of it.

ENEMY OF THE STATE

The Battle Over Sustainable Development in Ecuador's Intag Valley

by Gerard Coffey, La Linea de Fuego

QUITO — Born in Cuba, Carlos Zorrilla left the island when he was 11 and emigrated with his family to the United States. But the promised land did not live up to his expectations. Like many of his peers he found it hard to accept the war his adopted country was waging in Vietnam, not to mention the politics of then President Richard Nixon. So he left, looking for somewhere to live in peace. In 1978 he found himself in the Intag valley in Northern Ecuador where, he tells, he found an attractive agricultural area populated by solid and supportive communities. So he stayed. "I love agriculture," he says with a smile.

Attractive is probably an understatement. Intag, located in the western foothills of the Cotacachi volcano in Imbabura Province, some 150 miles south of the Colombian border, is warm, green and unequivocally beautiful. Populated in the late nineteenth century by families that migrated from other parts of the province, the area is a subtropical and primarily agricultural district with plenty of water, high levels of biodiversity and spectacular landscapes.

But the story of Zorrilla and Intag is not one of bucolic bliss. As he found out, peace and harmony do not come so cheaply. There is copper in the hills, and twice in recent decades mining companies have come looking for minerals to exploit.

THE RETURN OF BLACK MESA

Restoring Natural and Cultural Resources in Navajo Country

by Sam Koplinka-Loehr, Waging Nonviolence

As the Arizona sun crests the ridge of Big Mountain, it casts a deep red hue on Peabody Energy’s Black Mesa coal mine. Less than a hundred yards away, in the shadow of the towering coal processing plant, the Benally family gets ready for a day of school, work and sheepherding.

Black Mesa Mine is one of two coal mines located in the middle of the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona—the other is Kayenta Mine, just five miles down the road. Both mines opened in the late 1960s, but the Benally family has lived there for generations.

Norman Benally has been a community activist almost his entire life and remembers herding sheep on this land before Peabody arrived.

“I’ve seen the landscape change, literally,” he said.

POLICE IN THE PAY OF MINING COMPANIES

A Corporate Mineral-Security Complex in Peru

by Luis Manuel Claps, NACLA

Peru is a mining conflict country. In September of this year, the Defensoría del Pueblo (National Ombudsman Office) reported 223 social conflicts in September alone, with more than two thirds of them linked to minerals. The report also registers 196 dead and 2,369 injured in disputes over natural resources from 2006 to 2011. The database of the Latin American Observatory of Mining Conflicts (OCMAL) registers 34 cases across Peru. Even though the State has increased its presence in some mining areas and has its own Social Conflict Administration Office, the front line often becomes the ugliest side of corporate-community relations.

SYRIA: GENOCIDE BY INTERNATIONAL CONSENSUS

by Amr Salahi, Middle East Monitor

Ever since the Syrian regime gassed its own citizens in the Damascus suburbs in a chemical attack on August 21, the issue has rarely been out of the Western news media. However, the debate has been very simplistic. Any observer would be forgiven for thinking that the only crime committed in Syria was this chemical attack, and that the Syrian people had not been subjected to a genocidal war at the hands of a ruthless sectarian dictatorship for two and a half years.

THE VEIL: FLAG OF THE MUSLIM FAR RIGHT

An Interview with Marieme Helie Lucas

by Maryam Namazie, Fitnah

Marieme Helie Lucas is an Algerian sociologist and founder of the organizations Women Living Under Muslim Laws and Secularism is a Women’s Issue. In this interview, conducted by Iranian exiled feminist leader Maryam Namazie, she presents a provocative view of the controversy over the face-veil ban in France—an issue which has paradoxically seen Western progressives making common cause with Muslim conservatives, and Western conservatives purporting to act in the name of feminism. This interview is presented in the spirit of airing iconoclastic perspectives and broadening the scope of debate on an issue where conflicting definitions of civil liberties have created much confusion. —World War 4 Report

NAGASAKI CALL FOR NUCLEAR ABOLITION

by Ramesh Jaura, IDN

NAGASAKI — More than 50,000 nuclear weapons have been eliminated since the historic Reykjavík Summit between the then-US President Ronald Reagan and his counterpart from the erstwhile Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev, which culminated in the groundbreaking Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF) in December 1987. But 17,300 nukes remain, threatening many times over the very survival of human civilization and most life on earth, as the 2013 Nagasaki Appeal points out.

COP 19: TRUE CRIME

by Michael I. Niman, ArtVoice

This is crime at a level never before seen in human history. Star culprits include Chevron Texaco, Exxon/Mobil, and BP. Co-conspirators include your daily newspaper and evening news broadcasts. Hundreds of millions of people have shared the bounty of this ongoing depravity. Billions are now at risk of losing their homes, their livelihoods, and even their lives.

The latest chapter of this saga took place in Warsaw earlier this month at the "COP 19" global governmental meeting on climate change. The big news, and this is news, is that once again, nothing of substance happened.

MORE MARKET, MORE DICTATORSHIP

China’s Third Plenum Signals New ‘Paramount Leader’

from chinaworker.info

“More market, less freedom, and much more power to Xi Jinping”—this was the verdict of Beijing-based journalist Ola Wong, on the decisions of the recently concluded third plenary meeting of the CCP’s 18th Central Committee. Third Plenum meetings have a special status in China’s authoritarian system, because of the key 1978 meeting (11th Central Committee’s Third Plenum), which sealed the triumph of Deng Xiaoping over Mao Zedong’s designated heir Hua Guofeng and launched the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) onto the path of pro-capitalist “reform and opening.” Expectations among the capitalists in China and globally have accordingly been high.

URANIUM MINING AND NATIVE RESISTANCE

For the Uranium Exploration and Mining Accountability Act

by Curtis Kline, Intercontinental Cry

Native Americans in the northern Great Plains have the highest cancer rates in the United States, particularly lung cancer. It’s a problem that the United States government has woefully ignored, much the horror of the men and women who must carry the painful, life-threatening burden. The cancer rates started increasing drastically a few decades after uranium mining began on their territory.

According to a report by Earthworks (PDF), “Mining not only exposes uranium to the atmosphere, where it becomes reactive, but releases other radioactive elements such as thorium and radium and toxic heavy metals including arsenic, selenium, mercury and cadmium. Exposure to these radioactive elements can cause lung cancer, skin cancer, bone cancer, leukemia, kidney damage and birth defects.”

Today, in the northern great plains states of Wyoming, Montana and the Dakotas, the memory of that uranium mining exists in the form of 2,885 abandoned open pit uranium mines. All of the abandoned mines can be found on land that is supposed to be for the absolute use of the Great Sioux Nation under the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty with the United States.

SYRIA: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

The Grassroots Civil Opposition Survives

by Leila Shrooms, Tahrir-ICN

The discourse on Syria has been dominated by discussions of militarization, Islamization, sectarianism and geopolitical concerns. Conversely there has been relatively little focus on Syria’s grass roots civil opposition. This has led to a lack of knowledge outside of Syria for activists who want to stand in solidarity with Syria’s revolutionaries but don’t know where to start. This article attempts to provide an introduction to some of the many civil resistance initiatives taking place on the ground and efforts at revolutionary self-organization.

BOLIVIA: THE POLITICS OF EXTRACTIVISM

Geopolítica de la Amazonía:
Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista
by Alvaro García Linera
La Paz, Bolivia: Vicepresidencia del Estado, 2012

by Devin Beaulieu and Nancy Postero, Against the Current

Geopolítica de la Amazonía: Poder hacendal-patrimonial y acumulación capitalista (Geopolitics of the Amazon, Landed Hereditary Power and Capitalist Accumulation, 2012) is the latest defense of the politics and policies of Evo Morales' leftist government by its premier intellectual, vice-president Alvaro García Linera. As the eloquent public spokesman for Morales' governing strategy since the election of the Movement towards Socialism (MAS) in 2005, García Linera has made a name for himself in Latin American leftist thought and political theory.