Epistemic violence against Indigenous Peoples

Written on 25 November 2020.

The world of the Q'eqchí. Photo: AEPDI - Q'eqchi Ombudsman Office

Injustice regarding the validity of ancestral knowledge has been one of the many racist practices established by colonisation. For five centuries, a systematic attack has persisted, in a bid to bring an end to the creation, conservation and transmission of the knowledge of native peoples. In recent decades, religious fundamentalism has rebooted this symbolic violence to divide Indigenous communities and benefit from the installation of extractive projects and large-scale agricultural monocultures.

Continue Reading

The right to prior consultation in Mexico: its shortfalls and limitations

Written on 23 November 2020.

Indigenous peoples walk towards the rally in front of the Chinameca farm, 100 years after the murder of Emiliano Zapata. Photo: Daliri Oropeza

While we now have a government that has promised to be democratic and to govern for the masses of people, under its rule the same old colonial and hegemonic relations towards the Indigenous Peoples are being replicated. Far from implementing the international recommendations concerning Indigenous Peoples’ right to prior consultation, the current government is carrying out fraudulent consultative processes to approve infrastructure projects that hamper Indigenous communities.

Continue Reading

Independent report on WWF-linked human rights abuses shows conservation sector needs root and branch change

Written on 25 November 2020.

Killings, torture, sexual and physical violence and intimidation have no place in conservation

• A report commissioned due to intense media pressure reveals systemic problems resulting in violence and abuse in protected areas managed or supported by WWF and major problems in WWF’s organisational approach to human rights
• Systematic denial of traditional and customary rights to lands underpins the emergence of violence, intimidation and other human rights abuses in protected areas
• Global inter-governmental negotiations seek a doubling of protected areas over the next 10 years, creating significant further risks of dispossession of customary rightsholders from their territories.   

WWF has financed and provided technical support to conservation projects that have been rife with human rights violations including rape, murder and intimidation, and WWF failed to deal with these issues adequately, confirms a review (released yesterday) into WWF’s global operations.

Continue Reading

The end of the illusion for Indigenous Peoples in Colombia

Written on 20 November 2020.

Demonstration of Indigenous Peoples in Colombia. Photo: Archivo Semana

The Peace Agreement signed in 2016 between the Government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) raised hopes among the Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant populations and peasant communities that they might henceforward be able to live in peace on their territories. However, Iván Duque’s new government has not fulfilled its side of the agreement and, far from incorporating areas abandoned by the guerrilla into the institutional life of the country, the end result is that these areas have been left to their own devices. Paramilitary groups are now free to compete for control of the territory and to murder social leaders as a way of subjugating rural populations. In addition to anti-personnel mines and forced confinements, massacres became an added mechanism for exerting this pressure in 2020. 

Continue Reading