B.2.b. Global Indigenous Resistance to Environmental Threats

Interview with indigenous human rights defender, Virginia Pinares, from Peru, who came to London to represent communities in the Andes actively resisting - for example by blockades - mining for copper concentrates and molybdenum, which is controlled by the Chinese company MMG. Pinares argues that her community is not against all mining, but against the environmentally reckless way operations are conducted and the minerals transported, and they also demand a stop to the violence used against environmental and human rights activists.  She stressed the need for environmentally protected zones, which could be used f or sustainable tourism. 

Explores women’s fight against oil extraction in the Bolivian Tariquía Reserve and the threat against forms of self-governance, of dispossession from the land and the environment this constitutes. The authors bring into the analysis the false division between the public and the private sphere. The threat of dispossession, in fact, is projected in daily life, as when women have to endure divisions within their families, occurrence that is considered a form of private and public violence.

Notes opposition by indigenous activists (at ‘People’s Summit’ in Quebec City April 2001) to Free Trade Agreement of the Americas debated at official government Summit of the Americas elsewhere in the city, and reports some of speeches.

Examines resistance by indigenous people in desert of Central Mexico to government granting mining concessions to Canadian First Majestic Silver in their protected zone, and wider support in Mexico for their cause.