The People’s Summit on Climate Change began with a strong indigenous presence with a message to the world: humanity is going through a crisis of civilization, on an exhausted planet where we can no longer tolerate the biological illiteracy of those do not know how to read life.
Rivers like deserts don’t respect international boundaries. The Yaqui River established the natural foundation for the agricultural development in the 20th century of the arid coastal plains of southeastern Sonora. But the Yaqui River was problematic for agricultural investors.
Hydraulic megaprojects will keep Sonora “competitive and sustainable” and create a “Nuevo Sonora,” declared Governor Guillermo Padrés at the start of his six-year term (2009-2015). Elsewhere, local and national governments and international institutions are shifting their focus away from megaprojects like dams.
Sonoran Governor Padrés launched a package of water megaprojects, including an aqueduct to transfer water from the Yaqui River to the depleted Sonora River basin, as part of the Sonora SI in 2010. Yaqui opposition to the aqueduct, water contamination and the discovery that the governor had illegally built dams on his family’s ranch has cast a shadow on the governor’s promise of a New Sonora.
It’s 5 o’clock in the morning, southern cone time, on Oct. 13, 2014. The Pataxo indigenous people of the far southern region of the state of Bahía, in the northeast of Brazil, form three barricades across the BR101 Highway in the region of Monte Pascoal, in the city of Itamaraju, one of the main roads connecting the northern and southern parts of the country.
Emiliano Zapata, Mexico’s iconic revolutionary hero, is buried in Cuautla, Morelos just eight miles from the 620 Mw thermal-electric plant, already constructed in the small town of Huexca. In the same towns where Zapata fought for the rights of Mexico’s rural majority, mega-development projects are setting off fierce protests.
When you cross into Sonora from Arizona, you leave one hydraulic society and enter another. Both states are at risk. Their medium-term water futures are uncertain. The water megaprojects – dams, reservoirs, aqueducts, and cement irrigation canals – that have made the Sonoran Desert bloom with farms and cities are no longer sufficient.
A series by Tom Barry of the CIP TransBorder Project that takes an in-depth look at the water crisis on the U.S.-Mexico border. Part One: How the Mexican border state of Sonora is rushing forward with more water-management projects in response to escalating water crisis.
The Brazilian Ministry of Justice emphatically affirmed, “all of the proceedings to identify and demarcate the lands of the indigenous Jaragua Guaraní in the […]
The communal democracies of these indigenous communities may be the only thing that could save Oaxaca’s lands from the new onslaught of the cult of the individual and corporate gain.
