Category: Chapter 8

Land disputes in southern Costa Rica

Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / Other Central American indigenous land disputes

By Jiri Spendlingwimmer with material from Liz Richmond.

October 2020 

This section of Chapter 8 of The Violence of Development website includes articles on the assassinations of Jehry Rivera and Sergio Rojas, Indigenous Costa Ricans who fought for the rights of their Indigenous communities in the south of the country.  Jiri Spendlingwimmer, a Costa Rican anthropologist, has sent us an update on the trials and on the tense situation in China Kichá, one of the Indigenous territories experiencing the conflicts between the claims of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. Jiri’s account was translated by Liz Richmond who added more details about the situation. We are grateful to both Jiri and Liz for the news and article.

 

The case against the Indigenous people of China Kichá

Jiri writes: An eviction is pending against the Indigenous people of China Kicha (20 minutes from Cooperative Longo Mai). For the moment it is suspended due to the pressure of solidarity groups organised throughout Costa Rica – see below.

 

Update on a visit to China Kichá by Jiri Spendlingwimmer (27 Sep 2020)

This week a small delegation from the Movimiento Ríos Vivos (Living Rivers Movement) went to visit and show solidarity with the Indigenous land defenders at the Kono Ju farm, in China Kichá. For me it was my first visit to the territory.

We were surprised at how the police control access to the area; there is a permanent Police post around 1 km before the farm; and the police check each vehicle and person who enters, recording every car registration and personal identity numbers.  They determine who enters, and possibly investigate them.

The land defenders are very brave; they are resisting this very difficult fight whilst under constant threat.  In summer their crops were burnt, along with their water supply hoses. In total there are 38 people, including families with children. They have some necessities such as first aid kits, torches, batteries and face masks.

An eviction date is scheduled for the Konu Ju families for 29 September 2020, however due to the support and solidarity of individuals and groups nationally, there has been a temporary suspension of eviction, declared 25 September 2020.  Albeit temporary it is important, as this legal action will allow for more time.

The government’s reaction was reflected in a statement from the Vice Minister of the Presidency in Citizen Dialogue, Randall Otárola, in which he positioned himself for the temporary suspension of eviction. However he did not propose a concrete alternative solution, or speak in favour of granting the Indigenous land defenders their legitimate territory.

On the contrary, Deputy José María Villalta of the Frente Amplio suggests, among other solutions, that the executive power could disobey the orders of the judge, as these are contrary to the International Treaties applicable in Costa Rica regarding the autonomy and rights of Indigenous peoples, which are above national legislation.

At the same time, the Public Ministry dismissed and recommended the closing of the case regarding the cause of homicide of Sergio Rojas, land defender assassinated in March 2019 in the Indigenous territory of Salitre.  This sets a dangerous precedent, as it grants impunity to the murder of Sergio Rojas, and the same could therefore occur with the case of Jehry Rivera. This gives the green light to racism, violence and deaths towards Indigenous people in the process of recovering their territories, which has recently extended from the Southern regions of Costa Rica to the North, in the Indigenous territory of Maleku.

 

The case of Sergio Rojas

Sergio Rojas was assassinated in March 2019. Rojas was President of the Association for the Development of the Indigenous Territory of Salitre and coordinator of the National Front of Indigenous Peoples (FRENAP) in Costa Rica. He was a staunch defender of the Bribri of Salitre Indigenous people who have been fighting for years to regain their rights to over 12,000 hectares of land in southern Costa Rica pledged to them by a 1938 government agreement.

Jiri writes: The biggest scandal is that the courts decided to close and file away the case of Sergio Rojas with no further action.  They claim that they cannot determine which of the three suspects is responsible for his murder.

 

 

 

 

Jehry Rivera murder trial

Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / Other Central American indigenous land disputes

Contributed by Jiri Spendlingwimmer, Costa Rican anthropologist.

Translated by Liz Richmond, who contributed extra material.

In March this year we added to The Violence of Development website a report of the assassination of Jehry Rivera Rivera, an indigenous land defender in Costa Rica. We recently received news of the case from Jiri Spendlingwimmer, an anthropologist and resident of the village of Longo Maï in southern Costa Rica. We are grateful to Jiri and to Liz Richmond for extra information and for the translation.

Jehry Rivera was assassinated by several shots from a firearm on 24 February 2020 in the indigenous territory of Térraba, Buenos Aires, in the southern zone of Costa Rica. The previous night 150 to 200 non-indigenous farmers had organised and formed a mob to surround the town of Térraba, burned land, insulted, harassed and attacked a group of indigenous people who had recovered their ancestral territory. The following table summarises the acts of violence against indigenous people in the southern zone of Costa Rica around the town of Buenos Aires.

Given the incapacity and bias of the Courts of Justice of Buenos Aires, the judicial process for the murder of Jehry Rivera was assigned to a prosecutor in the capital, San José. It is expected that at some point a trial will be held. Today, however, there are no accused, nor a date for the start of the trial. The same impunity was evident regarding the murder of human rights defender and indigenous leader Sergio Rojas in Bribri de Salitre territory, assassinated in March 2019 – https://theviolenceofdevelopment.com/costa-rican-indigenous-rights-defender-murdered/ and https://theviolenceofdevelopment.com/following-murder-of-indigenous-leader-costa-rican-government-and-indigenous-groups-hold-talks/

Escalation of violence against indigenous land reclaimers

The Ditsö group in Costa Rica is a NGO that seeks to defend indigenous and campesino communities and to protect natural resources. Ditsö reports that between February and March 2020 there has been an escalation in violence against land rights defenders in four indigenous territories: Térraba, China Kichá, Salitre and Cabagra. The Cabécares indigenous people of China Kichá have suffered violent incidents including death threats, mob assaults, detonations of firearms, invasions in recovered land, fires, road blockades, physical assaults and chemical attack.

To illustrate the fact that these are not just recent tensions and incidents, it is worth recalling that in 2013 Jehry suffered a brutal attack for lodging a complaint regarding illegal felling of trees and deforestation in their territory – https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/complicity-and-silence-taking-land-indigenous-peoples-costa-rica

The Costa Rican State, which is at the centre of national and international criticism, has had to make greater effort to try to settle the historical debt with the indigenous peoples and resolve the conflict. In China Kichá, in May 2020, direct intervention was necessary by the Deputy Minister of Public Security Eduardo Solano to guarantee the removal of livestock from a reclaimed farm and to calm the situation.

Costa Rican Indigenous Rights Defender Murdered

Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / Other Central American indigenous land disputes

The following is a summary of reports from Telesur and other press sources of the assassination of a Costa Rican Indigenous Bribri land rights activist who was shot and killedlast month (March this year, 2019) in his home in Salitre territory.

Bribri territory, Costa Rica

Indigenous land rights defender Sergio Rojas was assassinated by armed gunmen who shot the activist as many as 15 times at around 11:45 pm in his home, according to his neighbours, in southern Costa Rica.

Rojas was President of the Association for the Development of the Indigenous Territory of Salitre and coordinator of the National Front of Indigenous Peoples (FRENAP) in Costa Rica. He was a staunch defender of the Bribri of Salitre Indigenous people who have been fighting for years to regain their rights to over 12,000 hectares of land in southern Costa Rica pledged to them by a 1938 government agreement.

This wasn’t the first time Rojas’ life was threatened. In 2012, shortly after the Bribri gained back some of their lands, Rojas was shot at eight times by armed men, but he escaped the shooting unscathed.

The Bribri and other Indigenous peoples have managed to recuperate control of some of their native lands but have become targets of violence from those who oppose their rights and sovereignty. Last December, men armed with guns and machetes held hostage two Bribri women and eight children on land they had recovered in Salitre territory.

According to the women, when police arrived they spoke “aggressively” toward them and asked for their land deeds, which the authorities claimed were invalid. According to the testimonies given to Tree People Programme, the police made no effort to arrest the hostage-takers who escaped.

As this website often reports on the violence and threats suffered by defenders of land rights, environmental rights and human rights in the northern triangle of Central America, it is worth emphasising here that such dangers are also experienced in countries such as Costa Rica whose environment-friendly reputation is high. Capitalist interests will use violence to overcome local objections and resistance wherever it occurs.

A note about conservationists and Indigenous Peoples

Chapter 8 / Conservation and indigenous peoples

By Martin Mowforth

The fact that areas inhabited by indigenous peoples are often deemed hugely important for conservation has been the focus of long-standing conflict and debate. It is estimated that 85% of designated protected areas in Central America are inhabited by indigenous peoples.[1]

Historically, the colonial paradigm for conservation involved the creation of parks and protected areas. In the endeavour to preserve ‘pristine’ nature or ‘wilderness’, indigenous people were excluded from conservation programmes and even forcibly evicted from the land.[2] It is now widely acknowledged that conservation programmes must involve the participation of the local people dependent on the areas under protection, but the feasibility of harmonising conservation and indigenous interests remains very much in dispute.

A project undertaken by National Geographic Society in 2002, superimposed a map of indigenous territories in Central America over a map with forest cover and marine ecosystems.[3] They found a striking correlation between indigenous habitation and the survival of natural ecosystems. That the subsistence lifestyles of indigenous peoples are less destructive to the environment than the industrialised economies of non-indigenous peoples is a reasonable assumption.

It is often noted that indigenous peoples have an inherent and sacred relationship with nature, a wealth of traditional knowledge, and natural resource management practices which they have been using for centuries to protect and preserve their lands.[4] Such claims about the stewardship role of indigenous peoples strongly support the possibility of collaboration with conservation organisations for maintaining biodiversity today. Mark Dowie contends that for both parties, maintaining a “healthy and diverse biosphere” is key.[5] Furthermore, the land and ecosystems that both conservationists and indigenous peoples are so keen to defend are seriously threatened by multiple and competing demands, including intensive agriculture, industrial forestry, and large scale development projects such as dams and mines.

An increasing awareness of indigenous peoples’ rights and the problems associated with the exclusionary conservation paradigm has led to attempts at more people-centred conservation programmes during the last 20 years. But, it has been suggested that there are inherent and irreconcilable differences in the agendas of indigenous people and conservationists. Whilst the former are primarily concerned for their economic wellbeing and protecting their land for their own use, the latter above all want to keep nature intact, prioritising protected areas and programmes grounded in rigorous biological and ecological science.[6]

The terms of involvement of local communities have been dictated by the conservation organisations, and indigenous peoples have continued to feel excluded, and some conservationists seem to have been incapable of coping with the social aspect of these types of projects.

Mac Chapin provided a damning critique of the three largest and dominant global conservation organisations – World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Conservation International (CI) and The Nature Conservancy (TNC).[7] He noted that their neglect of indigenous peoples in conservation programmes is partly due to their corporate and government funding and the conditions attached to it. He points out that indigenous resistance is often directed at projects executed by the organisations’ funding partners, who are also often perpetrators of environmental degradation.

Some hardline conversationists insist that any human presence will have a negative impact on biodiversity. Kent Redford suggested that ‘the noble ecological savage’ living in harmony with nature is an over-romanticised myth of indigenous people; that in reality they are prone to deplete or over-exploit their resources.[8]

There has been a recent resurgence of such a protectionist stance. Advocates of socially exclusive parks and protected areas insist that community based approaches to conservation do not offer adequate protection for endangered species and ecosystems. For example, John Oates argues that the compromise of agendas inherent in community based conservation programmes means that neither social nor conservation goals will be met.[9]

Others are more optimistic and see progress made in the uncertain relationship between indigenous peoples and conservationists. Mark Dowie comments that:

“Although tension persists, along with arrogance, ignorance and the conflicts they breed … I found, mostly in the field, a new generation of conservationists who realise that the very landscapes they seek to protect owe their high biodiversity to the practices of the people who have lived there, in some cases for thousands of years … Enlightened conservationists are beginning to accept the axiom that only by preserving cultural diversity can biological diversity be protected, and vice versa.”[10]

As Kent Redford and Michael Painter point out, achieving successful collaboration between indigenous people and conservationists is critical, and urgent: “while park advocates are arguing with indigenous peoples and their advo­cates about the proper role for people in conservation, the forest they both wish to preserve is being destroyed.”[11]

[1]   Alcorn, J.B. (1994) ‘Noble savage or noble state? Northern myths and southern realities in biodiversity conservation’. Ethnoecologica 2 (3): 6-19.

[2]   See Adams, W.M. (2004) Against Extinction: the story of conservation, Earthscan, London; also Monbiot, G. (1994) No man’s land: an investigative journey through Kenya and Tanzania, Picador, London.

[3]   National Geographic Society (2003). http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/0227_030227_indigenousmap.html (accessed 29 July 2009).

[4]   Mark Dowie (2009) Conservation Refugees: The hundred-year conflict between global conservation and native peoples, MIT Press, Cambridge.

[5]   Mark Dowie (2003) www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/jun/03/yosemite-conservation-indigenous-people (accessed 22 July 2009).

[6]   Mac Chapin (2004) ‘A challenge to conservationists’, World Watch Institute.

[7]   Ibid.

[8]   Redford, K. (1991) ‘The Ecologically Noble Savage’, Cultural Survival Quarterly 15 (1): 46-48.

[9]   Oates, J.F. (1999) Myth and Reality in the Rainforest: how conservation strategies are failing in West Africa, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles.

[10]   Op.cit. (Dowie).

[11]   Redford, K.H. and Painter, M. (2006) Natural alliances between conservationists and indigenous peoples. WCS Working Paper No.25, Wildlife Conservation Society, New York, USA.

The visit of Domingo Vásquez of the CCCND (Guatemala) to Europe, October 2018

Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / The Ch'orti' of Guatemala

November 2018

Information from Peace Brigades International and the Central Campesina Ch’orti ‘Nuevo Día’ (CCCND), summarised by Martin Mowforth.

Key words:  Indigenous and campesino groups in Guatemala; hydro-electric projects; mining projects; Maya Ch’orti community; criminalisation; assassinations of rights defenders.

Domingo Vásquez, a Maya Ch’orti human rights defender from Guatemala, spent the first half of October on a Europe-wide speaker tour as a guest of Peace Brigades International (PBI). Domingo is a member of the Central Campesina Ch’orti ‘Nuevo Día’ (CCCND) and a member of the Indigenous Council of the Maya Ch’orti community of Pelillo Negro, Jocotán in Chiquimula department.

Domingo’s visit follows that of Omar Jerónimo, also of the CCCND, in 2015. Their organisation supports community struggles to get recognition as indigenous communities and defends the ancestral Maya Ch’orti territory from hydro-electric and mining projects. Several hydro-electric plants are either planned or already under construction in the region. Omar and the struggles of the Maya Ch’orti against hydro-electric projects are also featured in the Interviews section of this website.

The recent security situation on the ground for CCCND members is extremely serious. So far this year 18 human rights defenders in Guatemala have been assassinated for the work that they carry out. Thirteen of these were land and environmental defenders. Many members of CCCND, including Domingo, face threats, attacks and criminalisation.

Recently Omar has had to go into hiding because of the seriousness of the threats he has received. PBI has provided protective accompaniment to the CCCND since 2009. Omar said “We have reports that ex-military personnel and gangs have arrived in our area. There have been 52 death threats in the last three months, 22 people have been criminalised, two people have been thrown in prison and 27 have been attacked. Over 20 of us have a price on our head. I have been told mine is $100,000, but I can be killed for $100. Last month my car was sprayed with bullets. We have been warned that the assassinations will go on. We are all scared, but you should not let fear stop you working in the community.”

‘Canadian tourism mafia’ file trumped-up charges against Garífuna leader Miriam Miranda in Honduras’ corrupted legal system

Chapter 10 / Tourism and protected areas / Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / The Garífuna of Honduras

Honduras Solidarity Network and Rights Action alert, November 17, 2017

 

Article reproduced here by kind permission of Grahame Russell of Rights Action and Karen Spring of the Honduras Solidarity Network.

Original posting by Rights Action at:

https://us9.campaign-archive.com/?u=ea011209a243050dfb66dff59&id=b5492c424f

A member of the ‘Canadian tourism mafia’ along Honduras’ north coast, that includes Patrick Forseth and Randy “the porn king” Jorgensen, filed trumped-up charges against indigenous Garifuna leader Miriam Miranda and three other women, in Honduras’ corrupted legal system.

(Miriam Miranda, General Coordinator of OFRANEH demanding justice at a large protest outside of the Honduran Supreme Court in Tegucigalpa on the one-year anniversary of the assassination of Lenca indigenous activist, Berta Caceres of COPINH. Photo: Karen Spring)

The four must go to court, November 24, to respond to these “charges”.  They potentially face up to 2-3 years in jail, and now must spend time and resources (of the few they have) to defend themselves from these manipulative charges.

Canadian tourism investor Patrick Forseth, of the CARIVIDA Villas company, has falsely accused Miriam Miranda, the General Coordinator of the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH), and three other Garifuna women – Medeline David, Neny Heidy Avila, and Letty Bernardez – of slander and defamation.

Miriam Miranda is a leading Honduran Garífuna activist who has faced numerous threats and direct acts of repression for her courageous, articulate long-time work with OFRANEH and other Honduran groups and movements.

The reasons behind the malicious charges against these four Garífuna women are quite simple.  Forseth and CARIVIDA are involved in a major land dispute with the indigenous Garifuna community of Guadalupe in Trujillo Bay, located on the Caribbean coast of Honduras.  Forseth has used several very questionable legal maneuvers in the now (since the 2009 military coup) deeply corrupted Honduran legal system, to criminalize any indigenous Garífuna people involved in land, territory and human rights defence work, in order to further claims that CARIVIDA’s illegal land purchase in Guadalupe was valid.

One of the local woman being charged, Medeline David already faces charges of illegal possession of land as a result of her participation in a community-led land reclamation project to recuperate their own land – land in dispute with CARIVIDA.

Geovanny Bernardez, another OFRANEH leader and other Guadalupe community activists including leader, Celso Guillen, also face charges laid by the Honduran state and CARIVIDA as a result of the same land dispute.

The legal case against Miranda and the 3 women was presented on May 26, 2017 and the first court hearing is scheduled for November 24, 2017.  If found guilty, Miriam, Medeline, Neny, and Letty could face up to 2-3 years in prison.

This defamation accusation is a clear example of how wealthy North Americans use and take advantage of the impunity and corruption in Honduras’ post 2009 military coup political and legal systems to criminalize people that resist their economic interests and projects.

The land defence project in the Garífuna community of Guadalupe in Trujillo Bay. The area where many community members are camping out is the land that is claimed to be owned by Patrick Forseth. Forseth plans to build a resort and villa project on the land. (Photo Karen Spring)

As the General Coordinator of OFRANEH, Miranda is being directly targeted in an attempt to silence the resistance of Garifuna communities not only in Trujillo Bay, but in other land disputes across the coast of Honduras.

Forseth is the husband of the stepdaughter of Canadian businessman, Randy Jorgensen (“the Porn King”) who owns and operates several gated community projects in the same Trujillo Bay region.  Some of Jorgensen’s tourist projects are adjacent to the land that Forseth claims he owns and “legally purchased.”

Forseth, Jorgensen and other North Americans continue to take control of lands that are inside ancestral indigenous Garífuna titles, some of which date as far back as the 1860s. Jorgensen is facing charges of illegal possession of land for his project Campa Vista owned by his company, Life Vision Development.

Karen Spring, Honduras Solidarity Network, spring.kj@gmail.com
Grahame Russell, Rights Action, info@rightsaction.org

*******
Background

OFRANEH members denounced for defamation by Canadian tourism investors Patrick Daniel Forseth (Carivida Villas) and Randy Jorgensen (Life Vision Developments)
http://mailchi.mp/rightsaction/ofraneh-denounced-for-defamation-by-forseth-and-jorgensen

Lands To Die For: The Garifuna Struggle In Honduras
December 20, 2016, CCTV Americas
35 minute film about violent and corrupt challenges facing the Garífuna people, lead by the OFRANEH organisation, in the context of the violence and repression, impunity and corruption that characterise the Honduran military, economic and political elites and their international partners.
http://www.cctv-america.com/2016/12/20/lands-to-die-for-the-garifuna-struggle-in-honduras

Miriam Miranda, OFRANEH leader, detained and threatened by Honduran police
On January 11, 2017, Miriam Miranda and three other members of OFRANEH (Fraternal Organisation of Black and Garífuna Peoples) – Luís Gutiérrez, Oscar Gaboa, Luís Miranda – were illegally detained and threatened by police at a roadside stop in La Ceiba, along Honduras’ north coast.
http://us9.campaign-archive1.com/?u=ea011209a243050dfb66dff59&id=6d6627ffdb

The Canadian porn king and the Caribbean paradise: Is a businessman taking advantage of lawlessness to scoop up land?
November 20, 2016, by Marina Jimenez
https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2016/11/20/the-canadian-porn-king-and-the-caribbean-paradise.html

The U.S. and Canada Have Blood on Their Hands in Honduras
October 22, 2016, by Grahame Russell
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/The-US-and-Canada-Have-Blood-on-Their-Hands-in-Honduras-20161022-0010.html

*******
Names/Addresses

Carivida Villas
www.carivida.com
info@carivida.com
(778) 242-8678
Carivida Club Café
Trujillo, Colón, Honduras

Life Vision Properties
http://lifevisionproperties.com/
90 Admiral Blvd. Mississauga, ON, Canada, L5T 2W1
1 (416) 900-6098

Ambassador Michael Gort, Embassy of Canada in Costa Rica, Honduras and Nicaragua, Tel: (504) 2232-4551; Michael.gort@international.gc.ca; tglpa@international.gc.ca

*******
More information

OFRANEH (Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña)
garifuna@ofraneh.org, www.ofraneh.org, http://www.ofraneh.wordpress.com

 

 

 

 

Copyright © 2017 Rights Action, All rights reserved.

Rights Action

Box 50887

20091-0887

Washington, DC 0

 

Investors in Honduran dam opposed by murdered activist Berta Caceres are withdrawing funding

Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / The Lenca people of Honduras

The Agua Zarca dam was one of hundreds of projects sanctioned after 2009 US and Canadian-backed military coup

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/04/honduras-dam-activist-berta-caceres
by Nina Lakhani, 4 June 2017

International investors withdraw completely from Agua Zarca project. Dam was one of hundreds of projects sanctioned after 2009 military coup.

Members of Copinh, the organisation headed by Berta Cáceres before she was killed.
Photograph: Giles Clarke/Global Witness

The international funders behind the hydroelectric dam opposed by murdered Honduran environmentalist Berta Cáceres are withdrawing from the project, the Guardian can reveal.  Three financial institutions had pledged loans worth $44m for the Agua Zarca dam on the Gualcarque River, which is considered sacred by the Lenca people and which Cáceres campaigned against before her death.

Her murder last year triggered international outrage and piled pressure on the international backers to pull out of the project amid a campaign of intimidation against communities opposed to the dam. The Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras (Copinh) – the campaign group Cáceres co-founded – has long demanded that investors withdraw and make reparations for the human rights violations linked to the project.
Desarrollos Energéticos SA (Desa), the private company behind Agua Zarca, has two major shareholders: Potencia y Energia de Mesoamerica (Pemsa), a Panama-registered company whose president – former military intelligence officer Roberto Castillo – is also president of Desa. The other, Inversiones Las Jacaranda, is owned by the powerful Atala Zablah family, who are also on the Desa board.

Desa secured loans from Dutch bank FMO, Finnish finance company FinnFund and the Central American Bank of Economic Integration (Cabei).  Berta Cáceres wrote to FMO in 2013 after the murder of her colleague Tomás Garcia, asking them not to finance Agua Zarca amid violence against the community. Despite her plea, the loan was granted.  Cáceres was killed in March 2016 after receiving multiple death threats linked to her campaign, and just a few months after her name appeared on a military hitlist, a Guardian investigation found.

So far eight men have been charged with the murder including three with military ties, but the intellectual authors remain free.
FMO and FinnFund suspended their loans after police arrested a Desa employee in connection with the murder in May 2016.  But all three investors have now decided to withdraw completely from the Agua Zarca project. In identical statements FMO and FinnFund told the Guardian they “intend to exit as soon as possible. However, project financing being a complicated field, many aspects and issues have to be cleared from contractual and responsibility perspectives.”

The Cabei, the largest investor, has simply stopped loan payments rather than seek a formal break in contract.  “The bank is no longer funding the project. Nor is there any intention to further invest in the project. Each bank is going to have their own exit strategy. Our bank stopped all disbursements,” spokesman Juan Mourra said in a statement.
Desa received $17m – just under 40% – of the loans before payments were suspended. The loans have not been sold, the Guardian was told.

An investigation commissioned by FMO following Caceres’ murder largely blamed the violence on intra-community disputes and downplayed abuses by state and private security forces linked to the dam.

Francisco Javier Sanchez, a Copinh leader representing the Rio Blanco community said that thugs continue to harass those opposed to the dam. “We demand the [investors] withdraw from Agua Zarca and recognize the violence and serious human rights violations the project has caused [in the past] four years of repression. We have rejected a hydroelectric project on the sacred River Gualcarque,” he said.

The Agua Zarca dam was among hundreds of environmentally destructive projects sanctioned after the 2009 military coup d’etat without legally required community consultations.

At least 124 campaigners opposing mines, dams, logging and tourist resorts have been murdered since 2010, making Honduras the most deadly country in the world for environmental and land activists.

Such projects have been backed by prominent Honduran politicians, business figures and military officers, but many are bankrolled by international funders.

*******
The above article was reproduced here with permission from Rights Action. Since 1998, Rights Action has been funding the community development, indigenous rights and environmental defense work of COPINH. 

 

COPINH (Honduras coordinator of indigenous and popular organizations)
#FueraDESA #1AñoSinJusticia #BertaVive #COPINHsigue
#justiciaparaberta #SoyCOPINH #bertavivecopinhsigue
listen to COPINH: http://a.stream.mayfirst.org:8000/guarajambala.mp3
web: copinh.org
blog: copinhonduras.blogspot.com
blog in English: http://copinhenglish.blogspot.com/
fb: Copinh Intibucá
twitter: @COPINHHONDURAS

“In all of Latin America there is resistance against dams” Gustavo Castro, ecologist

Chapter 3 / Case studies – local communities and water / Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / The Lenca people of Honduras

The activist points out that development of hydroelectric megaprojects continues to aggravate climate change.

By Vinicio Chacón, Semanario Universidad (Costa Rica), vinicio.chacon@ucr.ac.cr 

Sep 21st 2016. | Translated by Rick Blower

 Key words: Berta Cáceres; COPINH; criminalization; hydro-electricity; climate change; Kyoto Protocol; free trade treaties.

 The Mexican ecologist, Gustavo Castro, gained notoriety by being the sole witness to the assassination of Berta Caceres, the Honduran indigenous leader and environmentalist, on March 2nd [2016].

Castro is the leader of the organisation Other Worlds – Friends of the Earth and with calm but with forcefulness took on the Honduran judiciary, who, with incredible manipulation, sought to charge activists of the Civic Council of Popular Organisations and Indigenous Peoples of Honduras (COPINH) with the assassination.

From COPINH, Cáceres led the Lenca peoples’ fight against the Agua Zarca Hydroelectric Project (PH), a project of the company Desarrollos Energeticos S.A. (DESA).

In Costa Rica to participate in the II Latin American Congress on Environmental Conflicts (COLCA), Gustavo Castro spoke with Semanario Universidad in an interview coordinated through the Conservation Federation of Costa Rica (FECON).

What awakened your ecological conscience?

“It was a process of spending many years participating in co-operatives; I worked a lot with Guatemalan refugees who had come from the war. The jump to the fight for environmental causes came about in the nineties, when many investment projects came into the country after the North America Free Trade Agreement (NALCA), which obviously favoured the transnationals and the plunder of the country.

They were the country’s oil, gas, use of water, electricity, etc. It was not that there were no conflicts before, but when these pass into the hands of the corporations, they demand yet more favourable conditions for investment. They begin to modify the Water and the Mineral Laws, to hand over to the large mining companies the exploitation of gold, silver, strategic minerals of the country; now with the energy and also oil and gas reforms. This, in one way or another, begins to impact more and more on the environment, then begins a fight with more force about the defence of the territories; but also when we begin to see the deforestation that causes the infrastructure to favour the investments, not only in my case, but also in the peasant and indigenous communities you begin to have a greater awareness on the environmental impact.”

When did you begin to have contact with COPINH and Berta Caceres?

“I knew Berta in 1999, when we began to call for many processes of resistance, amongst them the creation of the Convergence of the Movement of the Peoples of the Americas, the Hemispheric Meeting against Militarisation, or the meeting against the Plan Puebla Panamá. We used to organise all of these meetings in Chiapas, later we repeated them in Honduras. A connection was made around the process of resistance in which we and COPINH not only took part but the whole region of Mesoamerica. There was much affinity in the process of putting together the movement with Berta and COPINH for more than 15 years.”

What is the most important lesson that you can take from the history of Berta Caceres?

“It is very difficult to name just one, because she was a very complex person, in the sense that she was very lovely, a very coherent person who had the capacity of structural analysis; also she could communicate strongly both with academics and members of congress, and at the same time she was involved in mobilization with the people.

“She was extremely respected and very tenacious, a very brave woman, always at the front of all COPINH demonstrations. Berta was very coherent in her analysis, her speeches and her attitude with the people and with the movement.

“With Berta’s assassination her personality was reborn on all fronts. As we say, Berta did not die, she multiplied, her presence is very strong.

“She was a happy person, she was very optimistic in spite of all of the adversity, even though she received many threats and assassination attempts.”

After the assassination was carried out and the hitmen took you for dead as well, what was the attitude of the authorities?

“I believe that what first took them by surprise was that there was a witness, they did not expect that. I arrived a day earlier at La Esperanza, (where Berta lived), so I think that only COPINH and Berta knew that I was going to be there. I believe that it was intended to be a ‘clean’ assassination, where Berta would be alone in her home. When they realised that there was a witness, they had to modify the scene of the crime and begin to make up a way to criminalize and implicate COPINH. They failed, so they begin to look at how to criminalize me.

“The authorities were unable to present to Berta’s family a credible version of events leading to the assassination, COPINH, the national community or the international community, when there was so much background information and the origin of the problem was very clear.

“For this reason they somehow tried to detain me in an illegal way in the country in order to find a way to impute me. In the end those who ended up being sacrificed are the manager of the company, the army and the hitmen. We know that they are not the only ones who are involved.

“The deal that they gave me was like a record card, as an object of proof, violating my human rights but also many judicial procedures. Everyone knows why, in the press, it emerged how the crime scene was altered. In those first days there were very many irregularities in the investigative process.”

Even when they produced an artist’s impression, the artist drew another person.

“I didn’t know that while I was in the Public Ministry, they had detained a member of COPINH on whom they were intent on placing the blame. Effectively, whilst I had not slept, was wounded, and with all this tension, they took me to the person who produced the ‘artist’ portrait. I told him that it was not like that, he erased the image and began to draw the same thing.

“They told me on various occasions that I could leave. I was obviously willing to help in all the proceedings, even though they had left me not having eaten, no sleep, without a blanket even if I had wanted one; anyway I went on supporting, left in my bloodied clothing. One way in which they tried to implicate me is that they stole my suitcase, which I left in Berta’s house, there was obviously the possibility to plant whatever thing which could implicate me – to date they have not returned it to me.

“They did not carry out any process of justice even though I appeared before the fiscal, the Public Ministry, the lawyer of the Honduran Commission of Human Rights, everyone is witness to me requesting a copy of my ministerial declaration, yet they wouldn’t let me have it – the copy of my declaration before the judge, and they did not give it to me; I asked that they return my suitcase, the same response. It was a total cynical violation of the Procedural Code, the Penal Code, and human rights.

“There wasn’t even a formality in the recognition of the faces. In the beginning they showed me photographs and videos of COPINH as if to say that the person responsible for the assassination was there.

“Many irregularities occurred in this process and so the government ruled that all of these ministerial formalities be kept secret.

“In the case of the state kidnapping at the airport, they took me back again for more meetings. Later, I stayed at the Mexican Embassy’s house for a month, up until the last day, without them giving an explanation as to why they wanted me, without even giving me a copy of the judge’s resolution which decreed the prohibition of my being allowed to leave the country, and before the insistence of the lawyer in the face of such judicial anomalies, such irregularity, the judge suspended the right of my lawyer to practice.”

Subsequently the authorities connected officials from the company DESA and the military institution with the murder, but you have said that it goes further?

“I did not say that, the press said it, COPINH said it, the family said it, there was even an attack against a journalist who explained a lot about the relationship and links between the judges and politicians in the problem.”

You have argued that to consider hydroelectric energy as clean is a ‘stupid idea’, which is a direct hook to the jaws of the proud Costa Ricans who produce energy in this way.

“It is not only Costa Rica, but the whole of Latin America, which for decades has always associated hydro electric as a clean development.

“If in Costa Rica they do not know it, they might know there is an impressive resistance in the whole of Latin America – the number of people who have been displaced and assassinated, who have not had an experience of adequate resettlement or redress. Even the same World Commission on Dams, which financed the World Bank, in the year 2000 published a report where they say that 60% of the basins in the world have been dammed, that 30% of fresh water fish have been killed as a result of the dams which generate 5% of greenhouse gases, that more than 50,000 large dams have been built in the world, that these countries remain extremely indebted to the World Bank, that 30% of the dams in the world have not generated the energy that they were meant to, that 80 million people have been displaced in the world at the same time flooding villages and towns. This is what the evidence tells us in the world, in all of Latin America, in Chile, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Panamá and in Mexico there is resistance against the dams.

“Since this report the social movement against the dams said “we have to disarticulate that discourse”, a discourse in which hydro-electricity is the same as clean energy, when it has generated all these disasters, including the disappearance of mangrove swamps and whole basins as a result of the construction of dams.

“With the Kyoto Agreement they returned again with the intention to reposition the dams as a form of clean energy, in the sense that the countries of the North, in their attempt to reduce their output of greenhouse gases, are looking to replace it with an investment in clean energy. So, if I have to reduce 10 tons of CO2 from the Northern countries, I can’t do it; better I build a dam that according to me will eliminate these 10 tons, it can be saved with clean energy.

“The effects of the dams in the world are a disaster. So how do we generate another paradigm for clean energy? This is the big problem; but not building, blocking more basins, displacing more communities, that favours the construction companies of dams throughout the world. There are other ways and mechanisms to generate clean energy. Even in Europe and the United States they are dismantling dams. But if we have to build dams in the South with the idea that it is clean, sustainable and green energy, it is actually the dirtiest energy that has generated all these socio-environmental impacts.”

Is the ecological mentality and this new paradigm to produce energy that you mention losing the pulse against the ideology of extraction, of which the construction of dams is part?

“I believe rather that much of the resistance is strengthening. It has even managed to stop many hydro-electric projects in Brazil, Mexico and many other places.

“The big challenge that we have is how the same communities build alternative forms of development. I went to COPINH as a guest so that we could reflect on other models and mechanisms of generating clean energy, autonomous, community-led, serving the communities, not flooding the COPINH territories for special economic zones, for mining projects. For example, the leaching of gold can use, depending on the size of the mine, some 2 to 3 million tons of water every hour. They need dams and large quantities of energy.

“The use of energy and water is required for monoculture, for industrial parks, for model cities, even for large tourist centres, large hotels, for the automotive industry; and in the end, the people are those who pay the price of this so-called development.”

At what point in all of this process is it driven by Free Trade Agreements? Is it realistic to hope that these countries will denounce these agreements and make room for a new paradigm of energy generation?

“It is a challenge. The responsibility is not only for indigenous populations and peasants to be alert to and resist this. Certainly the commercial Free Trade Agreements accelerate this process and not only the agreements, but the so-called Kyoto Protocol too.

“The Free Trade Agreements open the doors to investments: if before there were not 10 industrial parks, now there are and they require water and energy; if before there was not a European, Japanese, North American automotive industry in our country, now there are 3, 4, 5, and they require water and large quantities of energy. If before there were no monoculture plantations and now there are, like Monsanto in zones which require large quantities of water, so now there are. If before there were no mining projects requiring large quantities of water and energy, today there are.

“Free Trade Agreements accelerate the need for water and energy, which is why they speed up investment in all of these types of mega-projects that require these inputs.”

Is the Paris Accord on the same lines as the Kyoto Protocol?

“Yes, at the end of the day they do not touch the root of the problem and they keep on seeing how to carry on giving excuses, as happened with the Kyoto Protocol: 15 years after its approval, after the urgency is announced, and they accept a reduction of 5% in greenhouse gases not after those 15 years, but 15 years further on – that is absurd.

“Then, that 5% I am not even going to reduce; I am going to look at how I can compensate for it. I continue producing tons of CO2, but I can buy the Costa Rican jungle, the environment services, which may breathe 10 tons. So the contamination balances out to zero: here I produce 10, there I breathe 10; I buy breath and we give carbon credits or elegantly a green economy.

“The same is happening in all of the Conferences of the Parties to the Framework Convention of the United Nations on Climate Change (COP) that there have been. It’s not been anything other than keeping on postponing and postponing without getting to the heart of the problem.”

What is at the heart of the problem?

“We have to change the paradigm of the system; we have to stop it at the source of climate change and that does not mean only this atrocious capitalism, but also the pollution generated by the most developed countries: between 60% and 66% of greenhouse gases that affect warming of the planet.

“We have to stop it and, as Berta said, there’s no time left. She said a lovely phrase: “wake up humanity”. I believe that the problem is systemic, it is planetary and we have to become aware of the necessity to change this paradigm of development.”

©2015 Semanario Universidad. Derechos reservados. Hecho por 5e Creative Labs, Two y Pandú y Semanario Universidad.

Reproduced here by kind permission of Vinicio Chacón.

Threats to and assassinations of COPINH members, 2016

Chapter 8 / Land disputes and encroachments into indigenous territories in Central America / The Lenca people of Honduras

COPINH is the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organisations of Honduras. It was founded in 1993 and its headquarters are in the town of La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras.

Context

  • 2009 military coup.
  • November 2009 elections were so fraudulent that even the US no longer acknowledges them.
  • 2013 elections brought us President Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) in another fraudulent election.
  • 2011-2014: the highest intentional homicide rate (per 100,000 population) in the world outside a war zone.
  • Berta Oliva (Coordinator of COFADEH, the Committee of Relatives of the Detained and Disappeared in Honduras) describes Honduras as ‘a failed state run by the mafia’.
  • Since the 2009 coup in Honduras, 59 Honduran journalists have been assassinated.

COPINH, 2016

screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-08-41-49On 3rd March 2016, at about 1 am – 2 am, two men broke into Berta’s house and shot her dead having first shot and left for dead her Mexican colleague, Gustavo Castro. Berta was the Coordinator of COPINH and had been awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015.
On 15th March, Nelson García was assassinated shortly after he had been witnessing, recording and advising on the Río Chiquito eviction. The eviction of the campesino families had been carried out by 100 security forces in a violent manner. Nelson was killed later the same day.
screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-08-41-49-1On 3rd May, Felix Molina, a radio journalist who had reported critically on the Honduran government and who had featured COPINH in some of his reporting, suffered two murder attempts on the same day. He was wounded, but survived.
screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-08-41-50In early July, the body of Lesbia Janeth Urquía Urquía was found on a rubbish dump. Lesbia had been a COPINH member and had been working to stop an HEP project in La Paz department.
screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-08-41-50-1On 13th July, the office of Victor Fernández was raided. Victor is the lawyer for the family of Berta Cáceres.
On 28th September, the court case records relating to the trial of the alleged murderers of Berta Cáceres were stolen when assailants carjacked the vehicle belonging to Appellate Court Judge Maria Luisa Ramos in Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital.
screen-shot-2016-12-28-at-08-41-55On 10th October, gunmen opened fire on the car of Tomas Gómez Membreño, COPINH Coordinator, as he was driving home from COPINH’s office in La Esperanza.
Also on 10th October, gunmen opened fire on the house of Alexander García Sorto, an elected COPINH community leader in Llano Grande community, whilst he and his family members were asleep.

 

Lenca Indigenous Journalist Pablo Hernández Is Gunned Down

Chapter 9 / Chapter 8 / The Lenca people of Honduras / Troublesome Journalists

It would have been too much to expect that the election of a new president, Xiomara Castro, would signal a reduction in violence and killings in Honduras, although it remains a hope. Three weeks before the inauguration of the new president, Lenca Indigenous journalist Pablo Hernández was assassinated. We reproduce here the initial report of the crime by TeleSur.

Published 10 January 2022, TeleSur

Journalist Pablo Hernández, Honduras.  Photo: Twitter/@Orlinmahn

Keywords: Pablo Hernández; Honduras; Indigenous peoples; Bertha Oliva; Juan Carlos Cerros; AMCH; political assassination; COFADEH.

For years now, Honduras has become one of the most dangerous places for human rights defenders, environmental activists, journalists, and social leaders.

On Sunday, Honduran human rights defender Pablo Hernández was murdered by several bullet shots in the back in the Tierra Colorada community, in the Lempira department.

Bertha Oliva, the coordinator of the Committee of Relatives of the Disappeared in Honduras (COFADEH), denounced that armed men ambushed Hernández on a dirt road.

“This murder is one more attack on freedom of expression and the defence of human rights,” The Association of Community Media in Honduras (AMCH) said, recalling that Hernández was director of the Tenan community radio station that broadcasts from San Marcos de Caiquín.

“Hernández was the second Lenca leader killed in less than a year. In March 2020, Lenca activist Juan Carlos Cerros was shot to death in the town of Nueva Granada,” news agency AP recalled, adding that they “belonged to the same indigenous community as Berta Cáceres, a prize-winning environmental and Indigenous rights defender who was murdered in 2016.”

The AMCH denounced that Hernández was threatened and harassed on several occasions for defending the rights of Indigenous peoples, for which he filed a complaint with the authorities.

Besides having been a promoter of the Indigenous University, Hernández was mayor of the Auxiliaría de La Vara Alta, coordinator of ecclesial base communities, and president of the Cacique Lempira Biosphere Agro-Ecologists Network.

The assassination of the Indigenous journalist was also condemned by former President Manuel Zelaya, whose wife, Xiomara Castro, will be inaugurated as president of Honduras January 27.

Attacks on Human Rights Defenders in Guatemala

Chapter 8 / Other Central American indigenous land disputes

We receive monthly updates from the Guatemala Human Rights Commission (GHRC). Here we reproduce a small section of the January 2026 update regarding attacks on human rights defenders there. We are grateful to the GHRC for their regular reporting on the human rights situation in Guatemala.

https://www.ghrc-usa.org

GHRC Monthly update January 2026

  • Maya Q’eqchi’ Land Defender Murdered

On December 14, Víctor Manuel Colindres, a land defender who opposed mining operations by Rio Niquel, was shot to death by unidentified men in a grocery store in Colindres, in the Sierra Santa Cruz. Colindres had actively participated in protests against the mine from January to June, 2025. During those protests, 54 communities demanded that the government revoke 10 environmental licenses granted to the Río Nickel S.A., a subsidiary of the Canadian company Central American Nickel (CAN), and Producciones del Atlántico, a Guatemalan company. They argued that the companies’ operations threatened the biodiversity of the Sierra Santa Cruz located in Livingston and El Estor, Izabal, as well as their water sources. The licenses, which had been granted under the administration of Alejandro Giammattei, were revoked last summer. See coverage by Rights Action here. Another protester, Misael Mata, from the community of Las Flores, was murdered last May.

  • Fourth Indigenous Leader Arrested in Relation to Protests

On January 14, Indigenous leader Basilio Puac García, former vice president of the 48 Cantons of Totonicapan. Puac, was arrested and falsely charged with crimes. He is the fourth Indigenous leader arrested since last April for helping to organise protests that foiled a coup attempt in 2023, after Arévalo’s surprise victory at the polls. Puac, like Indigenous leaders Esteban Toc Tzay, Hector Chaclán, and Luis Pacheco, is facing charges related to his role in the peaceful protests. On January 15, President Arévalo publicly denounced the arrest as an unfounded attack on democracy and Indigenous peoples. The Board of Directors of the 48 Cantones condemned Puac García’s arrest as political retaliation and called for his immediate release in an official statement, specifying that such actions seek to intimidate Indigenous authorities.

On January 16, Puac was released from jail on bail, approximately 48 hours after arrest. Judge Víctor Funes dismissed an initial charge of terrorism, but indicted García on charges of sedition, obstruction of justice, and illicit association. Puac must report to the Public Ministries Office in Guatemala City once a month to sign the attendance register and satisfy bail conditions.

Chaclán and Pacheco, meanwhile, have been in pretrial detention for more than ten months, and a recent suspension of their legal proceedings, owing to the so-called Foundation Against Terrorism’s motion to recuse the judge assigned to their case, means they may be detained for at least four more months.

Guatemalan analysts view Puac’s arrest, as well as the arrests of Toc Tzay, Chaclán, and Pacheco, as a tactic to exact revenge on the sector that led the fight for democracy. During the 2023 protests, Indigenous leaders called for Attorney General Consuelo Porras’ resignation, since she was leading the charge to prevent Arévalo from assuming office. Her efforts included the theft and retention of ballot boxes.

On January 20, UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism Ben Saul submitted an Amicus Curiae brief asking Guatemala’s courts to review the country’s use of anti-terrorism laws. The UN rapporteur issued the brief in response to a case brought by the 48 Cantones de Totonicapán, which challenges the constitutionality of these laws. In particular, the brief reportedly emphasizes that the right to protest should not be criminalized under anti-terrorism legislation, warning against its use to suppress social and political dissent.

  • Maya Q’eqchi’ Community Evicted in Izabal

El Estor, Izabal remains a focal point of land disputes linked to palm oil expansion projects. On December 17, 2025, state security forces destroyed homes and forcibly evicted more than 40 families from their ancestral land in La Ceiba. The families  remain displaced. State representatives and alleged landowners Rina Castañeda, Isabel Bautista, and Imelda Bautista were present during the eviction and said it was carried out in compliance with the judicial order.

On December 18, 2025, the Authorities of the Indigenous Municipality of Santa Lucía Utatlán released a public statement condemning the evictions as human rights violations. According to the statement, the community has become an “object of territorial and forced dispossession,” calling on both Congress and President Bernardo Arévalo to stop the systemic violence and displacement of the Maya Q’eqchi’. Particularly, the statement references Guatemala’s obligation to abide by Convention 169 of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), which protects Indigenous peoples’ collective territorial rights.

 

Is Indigenous leadership a priority at COP30?

Chapter 8 / Conclusions

Doug Specht and Sarah Capes examine how Indigenous voices have struggled to be heard at COPs – until now

This article was originally published in The Geographical Magazine at:  https://geographical.co.uk/news/is-indigenous-leadership-a-priority-at-cop30  We are grateful to Doug and Sarah for their permission to reproduce the article in The Violence of Development website. Doug is the co-editor of The Violence of Development website.

The organisation of COP30 has posed extraordinary challenges from the outset. Belém, tucked deep in the Amazon, ill-equipped for the arrival of tens of thousands of global delegates.

Basic infrastructure struggled to keep pace: accommodation, transportation, catering, and even sanitation all proved to be harder to get ready than anticipated.

Yet, as Brazil’s President Lula remarked during the opening, perhaps these constraints are wholly appropriate. COP30 is designed to bring the conference, literally and symbolically, back down to earth. This city, surrounded by Amazon forests and waters, faces the urgent reality that ‘climate change is not a future threat but is already a tragedy playing out in the present,’ to quote Lula’s opening words at the event.

Recent COPs have landed in settings far removed from the gritty immediacy of climate impact. Sharm El Sheikh, Dubai, and Baku, each a hub for fossil fuel economies and international business, have offered up their coastal luxury and strategic positioning to market themselves as epicentres of innovation, finance, and future-facing development.

These venues, replete with comfort and spectacle, placed COP at a considerable remove from those whose lives most directly intersect with the changing climate. Lula’s vision for COP30 is a striking departure. The Brazilian president insisted on a summit shaped by local people, their traditions, and their foods, staging what has been hailed as ‘the COP of the people’ and, crucially, an Indigenous COP.

The impact is immediately apparent in the sheer scale and presence of the Indigenous caucus. At this summit, the number of Indigenous participants dwarfs previous years. Their presence is far from symbolic: Indigenous peoples occupy every corner of COP, attending as experts and as rights-holders. Their testimonies speak to the slow, relentless violence of ecological change, the devastation unleashed by extreme events, and the persistent injustices of poorly planned, so-called climate ‘solutions’. Yet, they also bring vital strategies, grounded in Indigenous knowledges and technologies, for mitigation, adaptation, and resilience-building.

And still, the story so far is one of persistent marginalisation. The UN’s endorsement of Indigenous peoples as an official constituency in theory rarely translates into impact when the decisions of COP are carved out in practice.

Too often, their distinct collective rights, outlined in international agreements such as UNDRIP and the Paris Agreement, are lost among the welter of other interests, private sector, finance, youth, local governments, and vulnerable communities. At COP28, references to Indigenous rights appeared only in generic introductions, buried deep within paragraphs copied from previous agreements, and were notably absent when it came to the central rules and guidelines on climate action and finance.

A critical point of difference, and one frequently misunderstood, lies in the approach to the natural world. Where mainstream climate conversations often reduce landscapes and ecologies to resources for human use, the relationship between Indigenous communities and their environments has always been one of reciprocity and respect. These relationships go beyond survival: drawing from their environment for food, water, shelter, transport, and medicine, they return a reciprocal care that safeguards the well-being of both people and place.

Even where environmental degradation has made traditional ways difficult or impossible, the underlying ethos remains: the future of people is inseparable from the future of the land. This sense of connection, at once deeply practical and profoundly philosophical, is largely missing from the hermetically sealed spaces in which much of COP is conducted.

During COP28 in Dubai, several Indigenous delegates raised to the author the question of how one could ‘feel’ the climate crisis through air-conditioned meeting rooms and windowless conference halls. How could delegates truly grapple with the scale of environmental loss when ensconced in man-made landscapes where even the grass is plastic, and the sun and water exist as little more than materials for technological “solutions”? How can the world’s most powerful decision-makers, cut off in climate-controlled offices, hope to lead on something they experience only in the abstract?

President Lula’s own opening statement at COP30 echoed this reflection. Quoting Yanomami Shaman Davi Kopenawa, he warned that city thinking is clouded by the smoke and noise of machines. Lula underscored the centrality of Indigenous territories to genuine climate change mitigation and expressed the hope that simply being in the Amazon, surrounded by the complexity and calm of the forest, would inspire the new clarity and humility necessary to recognise both the inequalities and urgency of the crisis. In Belém, the city itself still incomplete, the daily realities of climate and community cannot be shut out.

This year has brought a convergence both geographical and symbolic. The region is home to millions of Indigenous people and hundreds of distinct peoples The waterways that thread through the Amazon shaped the journeys of hundreds of delegates, many arriving after weeks of travel. They came together not just to bear witness, but to strategise and build solidarity, their very journey a statement about enduring presence and continuing agency.

At the opening plenary, the Indigenous caucus set out its demands with directness and precision. International human rights standards, including UNDRIP, must be protected within all aspects of climate transition, and this includes explicit recognition and safeguarding of Indigenous Peoples in Voluntary Isolation and Initial Contact, as well as redress for the impacts of extractive, unsustainable economic practices.

All frameworks for climate finance should ensure direct, flexible, and culturally appropriate access, which means a recognition of indigenous financial mechanisms and the ability to make autonomous decisions about expenditure and investment. There must be full representation at every stage of decision-making, from national plans to international actions, alongside legal guarantees protecting territory, governance, and knowledge.

Moreover, this participation needs to not end at the point of being listened to but must ensure that these interventions are truly heard and contributions taken into account in decision making. Crucially, the roles of Indigenous women, youth, and persons with disabilities must also be acknowledged: participation must be real and meaningful, not notional.

None of these asks are radical. Everything requested here exists already in the language of international agreements, but their actualisation remains elusive. What the Indigenous caucus is asking for is not new promises but delivery on old ones, and a profoundly practical engagement with the experience and expertise that they alone bring.

Does COP30 mark a genuine step-change? There is a sense, emerging from the city’s climate, its rivers and forests, its unavoidable proximity to nature, that this could be a different sort of summit.

This time, perhaps, the unique perspectives and voices of Indigenous peoples will echo not only in the theatrical spaces of plenary but in the final documents, the rules, and the funding flows that make COP decisions real. The crisis is not abstract; the Amazon and its peoples, so often erased in international debate, are finally impossible to ignore. If hope is a fragile resource, it is one that COP30, rooted in the Amazon, may nurture in a way that previous conferences could not.

Ultimately, climate action is not a technical fix, but a question of how people and places exist together. The challenge now is to turn recognition into reality and to ground the future of climate policy in the lived wisdom of those who have lived with the forest the longest.

Sarah Capes is a PhD researcher working on issues of environmental justice and human and Indigenous peoples’ rights at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study.

Dr Doug Specht is a Chartered Geographer, a Reader in Cultural Geography and Communication, and Head of the School of Media and Communication at the University of Westminster.

This article was added to the TVOD website at the same time as Doug Specht’s article ‘What a COP out!’ which appears in Chapter 10 of the website.