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Help Make Sarayaku’s Victory a Reality!
Last July the Kichwa of Sarayaku, an indigenous community from Ecuador’s Amazon, won a landmark legal victory against the Ecuadorian government at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The decision, which the Correa administration said it would respect, establishes new guidelines on the right to consultation of indigenous peoples and has widespread implications not only for governments of Latin American countries but also for multinational companies operating there. Amazon Watch and our allies are doing all we can to support the community’s journey from the Amazon to the National Assembly in Quito, but we need your help to make it a reality. Please support Sarayaku in the culmination of their fight for justice and accountability for indigenous rights in the Amazon and beyond. Join and support the Cause today! For the Amazon,
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Tag Archives: Indigenous People
What kind of love do you stand for?
In Tuesday’s Eye on the Amazon we told you about a dark love affair that’s long been going on between Chevron and Judge Kaplan; a scandalous kind of love that perverts justice and promotes persecution, enables human rights violations and compromises the health of entire communities in the Amazon. It’s a dirty ordeal perpetuated by Chevron’s ruthless efforts to protect itself from the $18 billion legal judgment it’s on the hook for. The company has engaged an army of relentless legal sharks – comprised of 60 law firms – and Judge Kaplan seems love-struck by his Big Oil partner as he thwarts justice in the case of Chevron’s desecration of the Amazon. But he’s just another tool in Chevron’s box.
Now we’re all for love here at Amazon Watch. In fact, it’s our love for the Amazon that motivates us daily to do everything we can to protect it and to support the rights of indigenous peoples there – the traditional stewards of the magnificent forest upon which we all depend. It’s why you support us. It’s this love that drives us, and it’s why we ask for your support.
We continue to fight for the clean kind of love and passion that flows through communities in the Amazon, like that which radiates from Servio Curipoma, an Ecuadorian farmer who came to seek justice at the Chevron shareholder meeting last May, calling for Chevron CEO John Watson to be fired. We stand for the love of people like Emergildo Criollo, a Cofán leader whose love for the children he lost to poisoning due of Chevron/Texaco’s willful negligence impels him to keep fighting against the company that destroyed his family. We stand for the love of the rainforest shown by the indigenous people who have lived in harmony with the Amazon for millennia. This is the kind of love story that gets us up in the morning, and that we ask you to be a part of.
In the face of scandal like the Chevron-Kaplan love affair, we need your help to keep writing this positive love story. Stand with us for the kind of love that celebrates life and a future we can all look forward to, that overpowers the dirty love between a massive corporation and a judge bent on shirking responsibility and continuing to put profits over people. We cannot allow them to hijack the ending of this story.
Please help us to continue our fight for these people and for the Amazon with your support. Will you make a contribution today so that we may keep fighting for justice in the Amazon?
You make this possible – together, we are powerful!
For the Amazon,
Branden Barber
Director of En
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Breaking: Indigenous communities fighting to reclaim stolen lands …
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For generations, the Indigenous Batak communities of Northern Sumatra have harvested and traded the sap from the trees in their sacred benzoin forests. The sap is used for the production of incense and perfumes, and exported to the international market. The villages thrived and forests were healthy. Today, these communities are fighting for their lands and livelihoods against the controversial paper giant APRIL. Please write to APRIL’s CEO Sukanto Tanoto today and ask APRIL to peacefully resolve this conflict now and return the community lands it has stolen. Earlier this week, hundreds of villagers risked life and limb by standing between their forest home and the machinery of APRIL’s logging operations. In response, Indonesia’s notoriously abusive security agency, known as Brimob, was called in to forcibly suppress the protest. At least 16 village members have now been arrested in connection to this latest dispute. This land conflict is just one example of the widespread human rights violations that have plagued APRIL’s operations for many years. This case has been simmering since 2009, when an APRIL affiliate began deforesting the community’s territory and planting eucalyptus plantations on their ancestral land. Tell APRIL CEO Sukanto Tanoto to release the 16 Indigenous activists who are still being held, to stop expansion on Batak lands, and to return the lands already stolen from them. Last September, APRIL workers and security forces again began to clear forest on the Batak communities’ land. The community gathered in large numbers to stop the machinery, confiscating weapons and chainsaws from the logging crew. Three days later, eight villagers were summoned to the police station. Instead, nearly 1,000 community members arrived in an inspiring act of solidarity. We must stand with these communities. This remains a dangerous and unresolved confrontation between a major corporation seeking to maximize profits and an Indigenous people desperately seeking to preserve their identity and ancestral lands. APRIL’s massive logging operations have run roughshod over the rights of local communities for far too long. Please write to APRIL’s CEO and let him know these practices are unacceptable and must stop now.
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