In January of this year, Isidro Baldenegro López was gunned down at his home village, Coloradas de la Virgen in Chihuahua, Mexico. He was shot six times, in the chest and abdomen, by a man authorities identified but could not capture. Just out of jail, he had returned to his family, against his better judgment. He knew firsthand that Chihuahua is a violent place. Drug trafficking and widespread corruption have made it, like several other Mexican border provinces, a militarized zone where the rule of law is only a dream.
But Isidro Baldenegro was not a narcotrafficker or corrupt official. He was a subsistence farmer and community leader of Mexico’s indigenous Tarahumara people in the country’s Sierra Madre mountain region. His 15-month prison term was handed down because he organized protests against illegal logging there. In fact, in 2005, he was awarded the Goldman Prize for his environmental work.
Isidro Baldenegro
Mr. Baldengro’s murder marked a horrible anniversary for indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere. Just a year before, fellow Goldman Prize winner, Berta Caceres— a member of the Lenca community in Honduras—was shot to death in her own home. She had been protesting the Agua Zarca Dam, a joint project of Honduran company Desarrollos Energéticos SA (DESA) and Chinese state-owned Sinohydro, the world’s largest dam developer. Like many such projects on Native land, Agua Zarca, “was pushed through without consulting the indigenous Lenca people—a violation of international treaties governing indigenous peoples’ rights” (Goldman Prize, http://www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/berta-caceres/)
Berta Caceres at the banks of the Gualcarque River in the Rio Blanco region of western Honduras.
According to the Goldman Environmental Foundation, the dam threatened to “cut off the supply of water, food and medicine for hundreds of Lenca people and violate their right to sustainably manage and live off their land.” Sadly, Beta Caceres and Isidro Baldenegro are the norm, rather than the exception. All told, 122 activists were murdered across Latin America in 2015. Being indigenous and caring for one’s homeland has clearly become a lethal occupation.
All told, 122 activists were murdered across Latin America in 2015
The NGO Global Witness has produced a chart based on statistics that record violence against environmental activists around the globe. It highlights, in vivid color, the awful concentration of violence the western hemisphere’s indigenous peoples bear in this global war for resources.
It would be easy for citizens of the United States to write these deaths off as yet more Latin American “instability,” if it were not for the parallels these events share with those in North America. A recent post on this blog detailed how the government’s about-face on the Dakota Access Pipeline brought with it more violence to the Standing Rock and Cheyenne River reservations, this time in the form of BIA police .
Yet anyone familiar with American history knows that this is standard operating procedure for local, state, and federal governments when they heed the call of extractive industries and their powerful investors. In the late nineteenth-century, progressive activists like Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (who opened the first English-language kindergarden in the U.S.) constantly warned their eastern readers that the “management” of Indian Country actually involved a corrupt cabal of territorial governments, the federal authorities, and businessmen with vested interests in Indian lands. Writing to the Minister Lyman Abbot, Peabody explained,
The Indian Agency is “the most effectual instrumentality of a formidable Ring, composed of the still unreformed civil service on the frontiers, and the majority of the frontier population, who deprecate Indian civilization, and work against it with an immense mercantile interest scattered all over the Union, that fattens on the CONTRACTS FOR SUPPLIES, which is the breath of life to this well-named ‘Hidden Power.’” (“Sarah Winnemucca’s practical solution . . .” 1886).
In an era marked by non-Indian backlash against globalization, the sacrifices made by Native peoples across the hemisphere are worth noting. As Native legal scholar Duane Champagne recently reminded us, indigenous peoples can very well be likened to the “canaries in the coal mine” of democracy . What is happening at Standing Rock is part and parcel to what has rocked the Tarahumara communities in the Sierra Madre and the Lenca people of Honduras.
It is high time Americans saw their indigenous neighbors as partners, not adversaries. We are all in this together, battling a global economy that has no care for our air and water, and prizes only what it can extract from our land—its beneficiaries hiding their profits in offshore accounts and manipulating the franchise the people have so desperately fought to win.
