Fourth Generation War against Evo | La Guerra de Cuarta Generación contra Evo

We are in the process of having the Spanish commentary translated properly. In the meantime, the following article has been translated to English using Google translator. We apologize for the inconvenience. The original version in Spanish follows. -admin

Fourth Generation War against Evo

La epoca

2011-10-04
by: Hugo Moldiz Mercado

One strategy that has media and social networking instruments of execution, has sought since 2006 to build social collective imaginations and sensibilities contrary to the process of change and to wear the leadership of President Evo Morales at the prospect of violent overthrow or political and electoral defeat. Taking advantage of unwarranted repression of indigenous September 24, the Fourth Generation War again showed his face.

The September 24th afternoon, a violent police intervention in the indigenous march Yucumo, opened up to unleash a variant while a new phase of Fourth Generation War against the government of President Evo Morales, who the national and international law has been proposed to defeat, as with other similar processes in Latin America.

And this Fourth Generation war is the dispute of the senses from the apprehension of objective reality to subjective unstructured and then set up another reality, radically different, but that our senses observe and feel it as true.

The media construction of a false reality of a fact left real: the repression that about five hundred police against indigenous developed since August 15 began a march to the seat of national government to demand prior consultation by the intention of building a road from Villa Tunari (Cochabamba) and San Ignacio de Moxos (Beni).

The violence of the soldiers there. There’s no doubt. But this gross error of the government policy was accompanied by the dissemination of news that amplified the extent of repression and, therefore, caused quite violent emotional reactions against the first indigenous president of Bolivia and Latin America, which coincided, deliberately or not- with the construction of a matrix of opinion that the national and international law is responsible for activating several months ago: “Evo, enemy of the Indians.”

The front-page headlines and news agencies, print media and national and international information as well as repeated images of repression permanently TV networks spoke of the death of a baby and other adults as well as the disappearance of several indigenous. Some said he had died three, seven and was not mentioned that the figure had increased to nine. It is evident that there were no casualties.

The wide dissemination of this news, never tested or exposed by the media on the nature of “alleged” or “transcended” but rather presented in a way that left no room for doubt, created an atmosphere of social rejection as adopted by the government, even in broad sectors of society committed to the process of change.

The media hype was not the same when a group of Indians held by the space of an hour over Chancellor David Choquehuanca, who was forced to march as a sort of shield to break the police cordon that separated the indigenous cultural communities to reject some items in the list of the Central Peoples of Eastern Bolivia (CIDOB). Most of the media have not been worked hard to emphasize the proposal prior consultation and installation of working groups that the government proposed on September 13 through the head of the Foreign Policy of the multinational state.

A leisurely look at the origins and behavior of the media leads us to think that some gross errors incurred in such information for negligence, but that others did as part of a sustained communications policy since Evo Morales took over the leadership of the country January 2006. However, even those not “misled” intentionally, it is obvious that became part of a new era of Fourth Generation War that has raged for nearly 6 years against the Indian government and the process of change.

In fact, in about a year and a half of the second mandate of President Morales, is about five matrices of opinion that have been built systematically “enemy of indigenous Evo”, “Evo, enemy of Mother Earth” “Evo, permissible activities of drug trafficking”, “Evo, a friend of terrorist governments” and “Evo, totalitarian and authoritarian.”

These matrices of opinion, easily traceable and identifiable in the media, as well as Social Networking has been joined in recent days, from Sunday 24 September, the strong charge of “Evo, massacre,” he which constitutes a very favorable scenario for the imperial strategy designed for the Indian leader’s second term: the strategy of attrition to defeat political and institutional change process and Evo Morales, the highest conductor.

Moreover, this subversive strategy materialized through the media war was also part of the components of the strategy for the overthrow by undemocratic methods that triggered national and international law in the period 2006-2009, with a maximum peak occurred between August -October 2008, when paramilitary groups were taking repressed state facilities and authorities and militants of the change process, and the attempt to divide the country and assassinate Evo Morales.

This active role of the media apparatus has been strengthened in Bolivia almost similar to that recorded in other Latin American countries where the right has no political parties and leaders with roots in society, so many scholars agree that in the media communication are part of “unofficial” political system.

Therefore, The Fourth Generation War serves to advance several objectives: systematic wear governments and political leaders, the induction of partial forms of violence against governments, the overthrow of the revolutionary process of change or non-democratic means and preparation objective and subjective conditions internal to foreign military intervention, the most important.

One of the cornerstones of this type of war is “winning the hearts and minds of people”, as defined by the general Summers, one of the ideologists of the so-called low intensity warfare and whose difference from the classic doctrine of Homeland Security is that the objective is not primarily the physical elimination of opponents, but especially the disappearance of the social base that makes possible the emergence and development of projects and political leaders opposed to U.S. interests and capital.

If one takes into account the above, you will find enough to identify which elements to President Morales has sought to specify whether construction of subjective conditions for his overthrow by undemocratic means and political wear an electoral defeat. Most of the media legitimized paramilitary violence in the first term of the change and now de-legitimize the right of the state’s monopoly on the use of force. Sure, the latter do so on the basis of the gross political errors as committed against the indigenous march.

In the plans of the more conservative right-wing sectors of the country not ruled out the division of the country to encourage foreign military intervention as an “appeasement” and is now threatening Latin America undisguised enthusiasm of some Obama advisers to use the “Libyan model” in other parts of the world.

Moreover, there is no doubt that the Fourth Generation Warfare is found in young people, to whom it is easier to manipulate by a series of objective conditions, the most important social force for the deployment of this strategy and that is fertile ground not both their greater identification with social networking but by the political neglect of which are subject to change part of the process.

La Guerra de Cuarta Generación contra Evo

2011-10-04

por: Hugo Moldiz Mercado

Una estrategia que tiene en los medios de comunicación y las redes

sociales sus instrumentos de ejecución, ha buscado desde 2006

construir imaginarios colectivos y sensibilidades sociales contrarios

al proceso de cambio y para desgastar el liderazgo del presidente Evo

Morales en la perspectiva de su derrocamiento violento o su derrota

político-electoral. Aprovechando la injustificada represión a los

indígenas el 24 de septiembre, esta Guerra de Cuarta Generación volvió

a mostrar la cara.

El 24 de septiembre en la tarde, una violenta intervención policial a

la marcha indígena en Yucumo, abrió pasó para que se desatara una

variante y al mismo tiempo una nueva fase de La Guerra de Cuarta

Generación contra el gobierno del presidente Evo Morales, a quien la

derecha nacional e internacional se ha propuesto derrotar, como ocurre

con otros procesos similares en América Latina.

Y esta Guerra de Cuarta Generación es la disputa de sentidos a partir

de la aprehensión de la realidad objetiva para subjetivamente

desestructurarla y luego armar otra realidad, radicalmente diferente,

pero que nuestros sentidos la observan y la sienten como verdad.

La construcción mediática de una realidad falseada partió de un hecho

real: la represión que cerca de medio millar de policías desarrolló

contra los indígenas que desde el 15 de agosto comenzaron una marcha

hacia la sede del gobierno nacional en demanda de la consulta previa

por la intención de construir una carretera entre Villa Tunari

(Cochabamba) y San Ignacio de Moxos (Beni).

La violencia de los uniformados existió. De eso no hay la menor duda.

Pero este grueso error político del gobierno fue acompañado de la

difusión de noticias que amplificaban el alcance de la represión y,

por tanto, provocaban reacciones emocionales bastante violentas contra

el primer presidente indígena de Bolivia y América Latina, lo cual

coincidía —premeditadamente o no— con la construcción de una matriz de

opinión que la derecha nacional e internacional se ha encargado de

activar hace varios meses: “Evo, enemigo de los indígenas”.

Los titulares de portada y de las noticias de medios impresos y

agencias nacionales e internacionales de información, así como las

imágenes de la represión reiteradas permanentemente por las redes de

televisión hablaban de la muerte de un bebé y de otros adultos, así

como la desaparición de varios indígenas. Unos decían que habían

fallecido tres, otros siete y no se dejó de mencionar que la cifra

llegaba a nueve. Lo evidente es que no se registraron bajas.

La amplia difusión de estas noticias, jamás comprobadas por los medios

ni expuestas bajo la naturaleza de “presuntas” o “trascendidos”, sino

más bien presentadas de tal manera que no dejaba espacio para la duda,

generó un ambiente de rechazo social a la medida adoptada por el

gobierno, incluso en amplios sectores sociales comprometidos con el

proceso de cambio.

Este despliegue mediático no fue el mismo cuando un grupo de indígenas

retuvo por el espacio de más de una hora al Canciller David

Choquehuanca, quien fue obligado a marchar como una suerte de escudo

para romper el cerco policial que separaba a los indígenas de las

comunidades interculturales que rechazan algunos puntos del pliego de

la Central de Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente Boliviano (CIDOB). La

mayor parte de los medios tampoco se han esforzado mucho por hacer

énfasis en la propuesta de Consulta Previa y la instalación de mesas

de trabajo que el gobierno propuso el 13 de septiembre a través del

responsable de la Política Exterior del Estado plurinacional.

Una mirada pausada a los orígenes y comportamiento de los medios de

comunicación conduce a pensar que unos incurrieron en esos gruesos

errores informativos por negligencia, pero que otros lo hicieron en el

marco de una política comunicacional sostenida desde que Evo Morales

asumió la conducción del país en enero de 2006. Sin embargo, aún los

que no “desinformaron” intencionalmente, es evidente que llegaron a

formar parte de una nueva etapa de La Guerra de Cuarta Generación que

se ha desatado durante casi de 6 años contra el gobierno indígena y el

proceso de cambio.

De hecho, en cerca de un año y medio de este segundo mandato del

presidente Morales, hay cerca de cinco matrices de opinión que

sistemáticamente se han ido construyendo: “Evo enemigo de los

indígenas”, “Evo, enemigo de la Madre Tierra”, “Evo, permisible con

las actividades del narcotráfico”, “Evo, amigo de los gobiernos

terroristas” y “Evo, totalitario y autoritario”.

A estas matrices de opinión, fácilmente rastreables e identificables

en los medios de comunicación, así como en las Redes Sociales, se ha

sumado en los últimos días, a partir del domingo 24 de septiembre, la

fuerte acusación de “Evo, masacrador”, lo cual configura un escenario

bastante favorable para la estrategia imperial diseñada para este

segundo mandato del líder indígena: la estrategia del desgaste para la

derrota político-institucional del proceso de cambio y de Evo Morales,

su máximo conductor.

Es más, esta estrategia subversiva materializada a través de la guerra

mediática también formó parte de los componentes de la estrategia para

el derrocamiento mediante métodos no democráticos que la derecha

nacional e internacional activó en el periodo 2006-2009, cuyo máximo

pico se dio entre agosto-octubre de 2008, cuando grupos paramilitares

tomaban instalaciones estatales y reprimían a autoridades y militantes

del proceso de cambio, así como el intento de dividir el país y

asesinar a Evo Morales.

Este activo papel del aparato mediático se ha ido fortaleciendo en

Bolivia casi de manera similar a la registrada en otros países de

América Latina donde la derecha carece de partidos políticos y líderes

con arraigo social, por lo que no pocos estudiosos coinciden que en

los medios de comunicación forman parte “no oficial” del sistema

político.

Por tanto, La Guerra de Cuarta Generación sirve para avanzar hacia

varios objetivos: el desgaste sistemáticos de gobiernos y líderes

políticos, el desencadenamiento de formas parciales de violencia

contra los gobiernos, el derrocamiento de procesos revolucionarios o

de cambio por medios no democráticos y la preparación de condiciones

objetivas y subjetivas internas para una intervención militar

extranjera, entre los más importantes.

Uno de los ejes centrales de este tipo de guerra es “conquistar los

corazones y las mentes de la gente”, como bien lo definiera el general

Summers, uno de los ideólogos de la denominada Guerra de Baja

Intensidad y cuya diferencia con la clásica Doctrina de Seguridad

Nacional es que el objetivo no es principalmente la eliminación física

del adversario, sino sobre todo la desaparición de la base social que

hace posible el surgimiento y el desarrollo de proyectos y liderazgos

políticos contrarios a los intereses de Estados Unidos y el capital.

Si uno toma en cuenta lo anteriormente señalado, encontrará bastantes

elementos como para identificar que ante el presidente Morales se ha

buscado concretar ya sea construcción de condiciones subjetivas para

su derrocamiento por medios no democráticos y su desgaste político

para una derrota electoral. La mayor parte de los medios de

comunicación legitimaron la violencia paramilitar en el primer mandato

del gobierno de cambio y ahora deslegitiman el derecho del estado al

uso del monopolio de la fuerza. Claro, esto último lo hacen sobre la

base de los gruesos errores políticos como el cometido contra la

marcha indígena.

En los planes de los sectores de derecha más conservadores del país

tampoco se descartó la división del país para alentar la intervención

militar extranjera a título de “pacificación” y que ahora es una

amenaza para América Latina por el entusiasmo no disimulado de algunos

consejeros de Obama para utilizar el “modelo libio” en otras partes

del mundo.

Por lo demás, no hay duda que La Guerra de Cuarta Generación está

encontrando en los jóvenes, a quienes es más fácil manipular por una

serie de condiciones objetivas, a la fuerza social más importante para

el despliegue de esta estrategia y que encuentra terreno fértil no

tanto por su mayor identificación con las Redes Sociales sino por el

abandono político del que son objeto de parte del proceso de cambio.

http://www.la-epoca.com.bo/index.php?opt=front&mod=detalle&id=932

Peak Hypocrisy | U.S. Backed Organizations Exploit Crisis in Bolivia

September 30^th, 2011

by Cory Morningstar

In their scathing “open letter” (whereby they appoint themselves judge, trial, jury and executioner – advising people that Evo Morales is essentially corrupt and has lost all support), The U.S. Democracy Centre states:

 “The events of the past week represent something new rising in Bolivia. The people – who have now listened to many Morales speeches about protecting the Earth and guaranteeing indigenous people control over their lands – have risen to defend those principles, even if their President has seemingly abandoned them. Ironically, Morales has now inspired a new environmental movement among the nation’s younger generation, not by his example but in battle with it.”

The Democracy Centre would do well to listen to their own admonitions.

If The Democracy Centre’s mandate was, in reality, to protect the Earth, guarantee Indigenous Peoples control over their land, rise to defend these principles, and inspire a new environmental movement among their nations younger generation, The Democracy Centre would (as would the U.S.-funded NGOs such as Avaaz and Amazon Watch who are exploiting this horrific crisis to its full potential) be endorsing, promoting and campaigning on the People’s Agreement of Cochabamba (in which over 20,000 Indigenous Peoples participated).

They have not.

And finally, is it not completely egregious for any U.S. organization (funded with foundation money via corporations and plutocrats) to have the audacity to dictate the values of human rights and non-violence to any country, when U.S. bombs are “reigning” down on occupied countries including Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya, while covert U.S. wars are underway in Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. These wars are murdering untold numbers of men, women and children – all in the name of resource exploitation, all under the grossly false auspices of democracy and liberation. The elite, institutional left take no issue in denouncing the Morales government yet remain silent on the war crimes committed by the U.S. – the biggest imperialist power in the world.

Bolivia is and will remain a country who desperately struggles to resist Imperialism and fight for their autonomy – against all odds.

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Read more about The Democracy Centre and their “open letter”: http://wrongkindofgreen.org/2011/09/29/about-the-u-s-democracy-centre-an-open-letter-to-our-friends-about-the-current-situation-in-bolivia/

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U.S. Influence | 2010 Ecuador crisis

“The script used in Venezuela and Honduras repeats itself. They try to hold the President and the government responsible for the “coup,” later forcing their exit from power. The coup against Ecuador is the next phase in the permanent aggression against ALBA and revolutionary movements in the region.” – Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger

“Venezuelan-American lawyer Eva Golinger claimed that the coup attempt was part of a systematic, US-supported plan to destabilise member states of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA). She alleged that US ambassador Heather Hodges was sent to Ecuador by former US President George W. Bush “with the intention of sowing destabilization against Correa, in case the Ecuadoran president refused to subordinate himself to Washington’s agenda,” and that Hodges increased the budget of USAID and the NED for social and political groups that “promote US interests.” Golinger claimed that certain “progressive” social groups received “financing and guidelines in order to provoke destabilising situations in the country that go beyond the natural expressions of criticism and opposition to a government.” According to Golinger, USAID’s 2010 budget in Ecuador $38 million. Golinger referred to the indigenous political party Pachakutik Movement’s press release on 30 September asking for Correa’s resignation on the grounds that his “dictatorial attitude” had generated “serious political turmoil and internal crisis.” In the statement, Pachakutik leader Cléver Jiménez said that the “situation” of the police and armed forces in the coup attempt “should be understood as a just action by public servants, whose rights have been made vulnerable.” Golinger alleged that Pachakutik was funded by NED and USAID and that its call for Correa’s resignation and its support for the mutiny was an example of the US plans to destabilise ALBA member states. Pachakutik strongly denied having “any relationship at all with the organism known as USAID, previously NED, not today nor ever” and accused the Ecuadorian government of having accepted USAID/NED funding. Golinger responded by referring to a National Democratic Institute (NDI, one of the four institutes funded by NED) report from 2007 describing Pachakutik being trained by the NDI in “Triangle of Party Best Practices and strategic planning methodologies” as part of NDI’s Latin American/Caribbean Political Party Network of over 1400 individual members, funded under NED Core Grants 2000-031, 2001-048, 2003-028, and 2004-036.” [Source: Wikipedia]

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A must watch documentary which clearly illustrates why extreme care and caution is so incredibly important during such a crisis. The stealth and deceit can be nothing less than staggering.

The War On Democracy

The story of the manipulation of Latin America by the United States over the past 50 years, including the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Hugo Chávez in 2002 (with English subtitles)

Versión en español

‘The War On Democracy’ was produced and directed by John Pilger and Christopher Martin and edited by Joe Frost. The film, John Pilger’s first for cinema, explores the current and past relationship of Washington with Latin American countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia and Chile.

Using archive footage sourced by Michael Moore’s archivist Carl Deal, the film shows how serial US intervention, overt and covert, has toppled a series of legitimate governments in the region since the 1950s. The democratically elected Chilean government of Salvador Allende, for example, was ousted by a US backed coup in 1973 and replaced by the military dictatorship of General Pinochet. Guatemala, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador have all been invaded by the United States.

John Pilger interviews several ex-CIA agents who took part in secret campaigns against democratic countries in the region. He investigates the School of the Americas in the US state of Georgia, where Pinochet’s torture squads were trained along with tyrants and death squad leaders in Haiti, El Salvador, Brazil and Argentina.

The film unearths the real story behind the attempted overthrow of Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez in 2002 and how the people of the barrios of Caracas rose up to force his return to power.

It also looks at the wider rise of populist governments across South America lead by indigenous leaders intent on loosening the shackles of Washington and a fairer redistribution of the continent’s natural wealth.

John Pilger says: “[The film] is about the struggle of people to free themselves from a modern form of slavery”. These people, he says, “describe a world not as American presidents like to see it as useful or expendable, they describe the power of courage and humanity among people with next to nothing. They reclaim noble words like democracy, freedom, liberation, justice, and in doing so they are defending the most basic human rights of all of us in a war being waged against all of us.”

‘The War On Democracy’ won the Best Documentary Award at the 2008 One World Awards.

The panel’s citation read: “There are six criteria the judges are asked to use to select the winner of this award: the film’s impact on public opinion, its appeal to a wide audience, its inclusion of voices from the developing world, its high journalistic or production standards, its success in conveying the impact of the actions of the world’s rich on the lives of the poor and the extent to which it draws attention to possible solutions. One film met every one of these. It was the winner of the award: John Pilger’s ‘The War on Democracy’.”

Read John Pilger’s article about the making of ‘The War On Democracy’ which appeared in the Guardian in June 2007.

http://www.johnpilger.com/videos/the-war-on-democracy

ABOUT THE U.S. DEMOCRACY CENTRE (An Open Letter to Our Friends About the Current Situation in Bolivia)

September 29, 2011

 

 

The Democracy Center, in the U.S., dismayed by what has happened in Bolivia, bitterly critical, and holding “the highest levels” responsible – and that, precisely because of the reputation of the Centre but also its powerful reach, is now issuing an open letter being circulated around the world, with this posting having been made from India.

Their open letter is found below.

The Democracy Center: Current Foundation Support

The Wallace Global Fund, Washington, DC: General operating support.

The Open Society Institute, New York, NY: Support for The Center’s investigation and publishing work related to Bolivia and Latin America.

The Shadow Foundation, Portland, OR: Support for The Center’s investigation into the Transredes (Shell/Enron) Bolivia oil spill and its aftermath.

The Democracy Center: Other Major Foundation Support over the Past Decade

The Rockefeller Brothers Fund, New York, NY

The David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Los Altos, CA

The California Wellness Foundation, San Francisco, CA

The David and Elise Haas Fund, San Francisco, CA

http://democracyctr.org/blog/about/our-funders

September 28th, 2011: A leading activist of REDES (Social Ecology Network), in Uruguay, responded / reacted to the posting by The Democracy Center by forwarding an article by Federico Fuentes, to give what he stated is “a more balanced and nuanced picture of what is happening than what we are getting via email and the news”: Bolivia : Crisis deepens over disputed highway

No wonder Jim Shultz (founder and executive director of The Democracy Centre) recently wrote:

“For a decade many environmental activists have focused their climate efforts on the doomed goal of getting the world’s governments to bind themselves to some form of enforceable planetary speed limit on the growth of carbon emissions and atmospheric temperature. It was a surrender of national sovereignty that was never to be. The fights in Washington and Bolivia are taking on the climate crisis where we will most need to wage the fight, at the national and local level, policy-by-policy, project-by-project. Shifting our best efforts from global summitry to decisions closer to home also links the climate debate to more immediate concerns like oil spills and forest destruction that might drawbroader support.”

While we must all support local struggles, the idea that we can win this the oncoming ecological collapse by NOT taking up the fight at the international level is exactly the kind of thinking his funders/sponsors would support and which the Bolivian government correctly understands is a strategy for defeat.

Below is a Bolivian solidarity response to the article written by Jim Shultz titled From Disillusionment to Direct Action: A Tale on Two Continents.

I think there is a major flaw in Jim’s portrayal of symmetry [“profound commonality”] between the Tipnis standoff in Bolivia and the Keystone XL pipeline protests in North America.

 

I would argue that there is a profound lack of commonality.

 

Bolivia is an extremely impoverished country struggling against powerful imperialist forces and penetration – led by the world’s only superpower. It is still in the initial stages of decolonizing and nationalizing its own state, one that had been largely gutted and stunted through foreign domination and the apartheid exclusion of indigenous peoples from public affairs and governance. Over recent decades NGOs with international funding came to fill the vacuum and to offer some of the attributes of stable governance, and in the process creating a special middle class, a clientel middle class. This was the flipside of foreign domination by transnationals.

 

The Morales-MAS indigenous government is leading a revolution, a long march, against this heritage. Not surprisingly, it is meeting stiff resistance from many NGOs and new NGO-based middle class layers. No surprise, also, that US and European destabilization schemes have found fertile soil in this NGO web of networks.

 

Washington has at its beck and command many arsenals of divide-and-conquer strategies and tactics, some first developed and honed in the settlement wars against North American indigenous peoples.

 

The defeat of the first indigenous anti-imperialist government in the America’s is a vital strategic necessity for US imperialism.

 

Now, can any such powerful foreign factors be said to be at play in Keystone XL pipeline protests?

 

I realize that the Bolivian government has made errors in its handling of the Tipnis dispute, but it is a vanguard force in both the struggle for indigenous self determination, and in the global struggle to save the planet from environmental meltdown. On both fronts Washington and its imperialist system is the principal enemy.

 

Jim’s article obscures this fundamental divide, and for that reason strikes me more as part of the problem than the solution.

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Jim Shultz, The Democracy Center: An Open Letter to Our Friends About the Current Situation in Bolivia

Dear Friends,

Over the past few days we have received many emails from friends outside of Bolivia, long-time supporters of the struggle for social justice here, asking for our opinion and analysis about the turbulent events of the past week. In particular, people want to understand what led to the government’s

of the indigenous march protesting construction of a highway through the TIPNIS rainforest. As many of you know, a year ago the Democracy Center stopped its ongoing reporting about events in Bolivia and we intend to return to that role. However, given recent events neither can we be silent. Our analysis and views are represented in the article below. Please share it with others who might be interested.

Jim Shultz

The Democracy Center

The Morales Presidency Takes an Ugly Turn

In 2005, Sacha Llorenti, the President of Bolivia’s National Human Rights Assembly, wrote a forward for our Democracy Center report on an incident here two years previously, known as ‘Febrero Negro’. The IMF had demanded that Bolivia tighten its economic belt and President Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada complied by proposing a new tax on the poor. His action set off a wave of protest and government repression that left 34 people dead. Llorenti wrote of the government’s repression, “Those days refer to an institutional crisis, state violence, and her twin sister, impunity.”

Only months after Llorenti wrote those words, that era in Bolivia’s history seemed swept away in a wave of hope. The nation’s first indigenous President, Evo Morales, rode into power on a voter mandate unmatched in modern Bolivian history. He proclaimed a new Bolivia in which indigenous people would take their rightful place in the nation’s political life, human rights would be respected, and a new constitution would guarantee autonomy for communities ignored by the governments of the past. Overnight the people who had been attacked or ignored by Bolivia’s leaders suddenly became Bolivia’s leaders. Llorenti eventually rose to the most powerful appointed position in the nation, Minister of Government. The rays of optimism that spread out from Tiwanaku and La Paz extended worldwide and Morales become a global symbol of something hopeful.

It is a sad measure of how deeply things have changed that it was Llorenti himself who stepped behind the podium at the Presidential Palace last Monday to defend the Morales government’s violent repression of indigenous protesters on September 25th. Five hundred police armed with guns, batons and tear gas were sent to a remote roadside to break up the six-week-long march of indigenous families protesting Morales’ planned highway through the TIPNIS rainforest. Llorenti’s declarations echoed the tired justifications heard from so many governments before: “All the actions taken by the police had the objective of preventingconflicts and if cases of abuse have been committed they will be punished.”

Men, women and children marching to defend their lands were attacked with a barrage of tear gas, their leaders were beaten, women had bands of tape forcibly wrapped over their mouths – all under orders from a government that had promised to be theirs. How did it come to this?

The Highway Through the Rainforest

The indigenous families that were attacked by police on that Sunday left their lands in the TIPNIS on August 15th to march nearly 400 miles to their nation’s capital and press their case against the road that would cut through the heart of their lands. President Morales had made it very clear that he was not interested in hearing any more of their arguments against the mainly Brazil-financed highway. In June he declared, “Whether you like it or not, we are going to build this road.”

Morales argued that the highway was needed for “development,” creating new economic opportunities in parts of the country long isolated. In the name of those goals he was willing to ignore the requirements of community consultation and autonomy in the new Constitution that he had once championed. He was willing to abandon his own rhetoric to the world about protecting Mother Earth and to ignore studies about the likely destruction of the forest that the new highway would bring. What could have been a moment of authentic and valuable debate in Bolivia about what kind of development the nation really wanted instead became a series of presidential declarations and decrees.

As the march of some 1,000 people crept slowly onward toward La Paz its moral weight seem to grow with each step, drawing growing public attention that Morales couldn’t stop. The march became the lead story in the country’s daily papers every morning for weeks. Civic actions in support of the marchers grew in Bolivia’s major cities. More than sixty international environmental groups, led by Amazon Watch, signed a letter to Morales asking him to respect the marchers’ demands.

From Morales, however, each day only brought a new set of accusations aimed at stripping the marchers of their legitimacy. First, said the government, the march was the creation of the U.S. Embassy. Then the government declared that the marchers were the pawns of foreign and domestic NGOs. Last week while in New York for his speech to the U.N., the Morales entourage announced that it had evidence that it was former President Sanchez de Lozada who was behind the march. The litany of ever-changing charges began to sound something akin to a schoolboy scrambling to invent reasons for why he didn’t have his homework.

When the charges failed to derail the marchers’ support, the government and its supporters decided to try to steer them off their path to La Paz in other ways. They blocked the arrival of urgent donations of water, food, and medicine gathered and sent from throughout the country. But this only added yet again to the moral weight of humble people walking the long road to the capital.

Tear Gas at Dusk

Just after 5pm on Sunday, September 25, five hundred police dressed in full battle gear descended on the encampment (

) where the marchers had pitched themselves for the night. Running at full speed they began firing canisters of toxic tear gas directly into the terrified groups of men, women, and children. Then the police began forcing them, screaming and crying, onto buses and into the backs of unmarked trucks for unknown destinations. Television footage captured the police knocking women to the ground and binding their mouths shut with tape. Many others ran to escape into the trees and fields so far from their homes. Children were separated from their parents.

Later that night those who had escaped the police began to take refuge in the small church of the town of San Borja. Early Monday morning government planes tried to land on an air strip in the town of Rurrenabaque, where more than 200 captured marchers were to be forcibly put aboard and returned to the villages where they had begun their trek so many weeks and miles before. The people in the community swarmed the runway to keep the planes from landing and were met with another attack of tear gas by the police sent there by the government.

Hours later the country’s young Defense Minister, Cecilia Chacon, announced her resignation. She wrote in a public letter to President Morales, “I can not defend or justify it [Sunday’s repression]. There are otheralternatives in the framework of dialogue, respect for human rights, nonviolence, and defense of Mother Earth.”

She became the latest in a string of former Morales allies who had dramatically split from the government over the TIPNIS highway and the government’s abuses of the marchers. Morales’ former ambasador to the U.S., Gustavo Guzman, and the President’s former Vice-Minister for Land, Alejandro Almaraz, had not only left the government but also gone to join the marchers.

Over the course of the following Monday public denouncements poured out against the police attack on the marchers – from the National Public Ombudsman, the U.N., women’s groups, human rights groups, the Catholic Church, labor unions, and others, including many who had once been fervent Morales supporters.

By that Monday evening, with his public support in freefall, Morales finally spoke to the nation. He began by denying any involvement in Sunday’s police violence, blaming it on unnamed subordinates. But after years of arguing that his predecessors should be prosecuted for the abuses of soldiers and police under their command, it was a defense that convinced no one. Several key government officials told journalists that such an aggressive police action would never have taken place without orders from the government’s highest ranks.

Morales then announced that he would put the highway to a vote by the two Bolivian states, Cochabamba and Beni, through which the project would pass. Almaraz, the former Lands Vice-Minister, and others, quickly pointed out that such a referendum was unconstitutional, a direct violation of the provisions allowing local indigenous communities to decide the fates of their lands.

If Morales thought he had plugged the political leak in his weakened Presidency, it became clear Tuesday morning that the anger against him was only growing. Larger marches filled the streets in the cities of La Paz, Cochabamba, Santa Cruz and Sucre. The country’s labor federation (C.O.B) announced a strike. By nightfall the nation’s transportation workers announced that they too would stage a work stoppage Wednesday in opposition to the highway and in support of the marchers.

Just after 7pm Tuesday night Sacha Llorenti appeared at the Presidential Palace podium once again, this time to announce his own resignation. It appeared not so much an act of conscience, in the mold of Ms. Chacon’s the day before, but more a man being tossed overboard in the hope that it might afford the President some political protection.

Then Morales took to the airwaves to add an announcement of his own –

the temporary suspension of construction of the disputed road. But by early Wednesday news reports revealed that the Brazilian firm happily bulldozing the highway had received no such order.

A People Rising

Wednesday morning Evo Morales woke to a nation headed for a transit standstill, with new marchers headed to the streets, schools closed and a nation deeply angry with its President. The cheering crowds of his 2006 inaugural had become a distant memory.

What is behind Morales’ devotion to a road through the heart of the TIPNIS? Is he simply a stubborn believer in a vision of economic development filled with highways and factories, in the style of the North? Is it a matter of Presidential ego, of not wanting to make the call to his Brazilian counterpart (Brazil is both the financier and constructor of the road, and eager to gain access to the natural resources it would make accessible), admitting that he can’t deliver on a Presidential promise? Are his deepest supporters, the coca growers, so anxious for a road that will open up new lands for expanding their crop that Morales has been willing to push things this far? Only President Morales knows his true motivations. But what is a certainty is that he has paid an enormous political cost for sticking to them.

The events of the past week represent something new rising in Bolivia. The people – who have now listened to many Morales speeches about protecting the Earth and guaranteeing indigenous people control over their lands – have risen to defend those principles, even if their President has seemingly abandoned them. Ironically, Morales has now inspired a new environmental movement among the nation’s younger generation, not by his example but in battle with it.

In my interview with Sacha Llorenti for our report on Febrero Negro, he also told me something else. He told me that the 2003 repression was, “the moment in which the crisis of the country was stripped down to the point where you could see its bones.” Today in Bolivia a different crisis has laid bare a new set of political bones for all to see.

Evo Morales, in his global pulpit, had been an inspiring voice, especially on climate change and on challenging the excesses of the U.S. In Bolivia on economic matters he has often been true to the world, raising taxes on foreign oil companies and using some of those revenues to give school children a modest annual bonus for staying in the classroom.

But the abuses dealt out by the government against the people of the TIPNIS have knocked ‘Evo the icon’ off his pedestal in a way from which he will never fully recover, in Bolivia and globally. He seems now pretty much like any other politician. What has risen instead is a movement once again of the Bolivian people themselves – awake, mobilized, and courageous. The defense of Bolivia’s environment and indigenous people now rests in the hands, not of Presidential power, but people power – where real democracy must always reside.

International Communiqué Wednesday September 28th, 2011 Regarding letter to Morales on TIPNIS dispute

The following communiqué was issued on Wednesday September 28th, 2011 in response to a post sent to an International Climate Justice list on Sunday, September 24th, 2011 and another (below) on Tuesday September 27th, 2011. Where no authorization by contributors has been approved, names and list identities have been removed. Where contributors have authorized their views be made public, names are identified. -admin

From: Cory Morningstar
Sent: Wednesday, September 28, 2011 10:31 AM
To: (removed)
Cc: (removed); (removed)

Subject: RE: FW: [removed] FW: Regarding letter to Morales on TIPNIS dispute

This will be my last response to this communication.

You stated previously:

"To not hold him to the same standard we hold elected officials to everywhere is to do him and our climate justice movement a disservice."

Of course. Yet there are observations to be made in regards to this statement. Questions that arise include: where was the Avaaz campaign/petition against Harper after the massive violence/mass arrests against the G20 protesters in Toronto by the state police – under the Harper regime? This state violence represented the greatest violation of civil rights in recent Canadian history. Where is the Avaaz petition against the Obama regime for the violence by state police happening right now on Wall Street? The cops are gassing the shit out of them too. The list goes on & on & on. If Avaaz campaigned on these – I did not see it being circulated.

You stated:

"However, it appears that, as a result of the letters–those signed by groups inside and outside of Bolivia, who knew that violence by the police against the marchers was pending–Morales has suspended his support for the project. I wish the letters had had this affect before the violence played itself out, but one of the reasons for the letters was to try to prevent this from escalating the way it did, which only Morales could do"

Was Morales’ about-face on the project a result of the Avaaz and Amazon Watch petitions? Was it a result of media coverage of the violence that ensued? Was it a result of his own government officials protesting and resigning? Was it a result of letters like the attached, clearly demarcating appropriate places to build roads, couching their criticism in cautious frames?

We may never know. But it seems all of these voices in support of the protesters are having an effect."

Yet, before this violence on the protesters occurred, it was reported that the issue was going to the Bolivian people to decide by way of a referendum. (I wish we had these in Canada)

Also:

"As protesters began to make their way to La Paz, at least nine attempts at dialogue were made by the government to try and resolve the demands of the marchers." (http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/48959)

Morales has been painted as an evil villain to the world, along with most other leaders who ever attempted / attempt to keep their resources for their own people such as Chavez, Castro, – and many more who have been toppled or assassinated by the US.

Much damage has been done in many ways. Divisions have been created which will no doubt be preyed upon and capitalized upon by US interests/influences. Perhaps it stopped escalating not because of letters, but only because Morales is completely familiar with how liberating countries are successfully toppled by US power/interference. Perhaps he stopped everything in its tracks because he recognized what was happening and recognized that his people – and outside people – were successfully being manipulated. I’m not saying this is what happened – I’m saying we cannot underestimate US interference.

Let us not fall into a trap that will only serve to further hurt and destroy the very people we wish to support.

How many times do we see this happening: The crazy dictator is carrying out violence on his own people! The people must be saved from the tyrant! Don’t worry good citizens – the west will save you! Democracy and liberation are coming your way! The colonizers will save you! (only if you have resources we can steal). It’s the same story over and over again. And why not? The world seems to fall for it over & over again. Weeks or months later the truth will slowly begin to reveal itself. Who was involved. When it was planned, how people were coerced or manipulated, etc. etc. And of course this information is rarely/never put out by corporate media – an integral part of the Imperialist death machine. Of course by then it is too late, while the bombs are being dropped on the civilians, everyone goes back to catching up on facebook and drinking their lattes.

(removed)’s message this morning, confirms once again, – we must be so incredibly cautious with countries the Imperialist powers have set their sights on.

Important questions arise regarding the Bolivian Indigenous groups demanding REDD. Who/what organizations specifically, are teaching/convincing these Indigenous groups that REDD would be good for them? This is a critical question that needs an answer. http://climate-connections.org/2011/09/23/blog-post-from-the-belly-of-the-beast-in-the-bowels-of-the-world-bank/

You state:

"Destabilization by US AID or other foreign actors is, in my mind, a separate and equally important issue. We all must hold our own governments to account for efforts to destabilize other governments.

But silence is, in my mind, unacceptable in the face of violence. And if destabilization is a concern, as it should be, then violence against one’s own citizens should be condemned."

I strongly disagree that destabilization by US AID, etc. is a separate issue. It is very possible – if not likely – that this was the very root of what has just transpired. To believe that funding of NGOs and institutions are separate to such crises is, in my opinion, both naive and very dangerous. History shows us clearly that the forces we seek to resist constantly absorb opposition, through compromised NGOs and other means. All means. Every means. If we are not understanding by now how Imperialism and Colonialism conquer, we are not doing our homework. To simply dismiss the funding ties and the partnerships with powerful foreign interests, REDD advocates, etc. is dangerous denial.

The author is suggesting that destabilization (by US powers) must be considered a likely possibility in what just happened. No one was suggesting silence on the issue. Rather – urgent mediation. People were urging dialogue with all groups involved and the government rather than infusing the crisis which could have easily resulted in aiding and abetting an internal war, which, as we see repeatedly, gives Imperialist states the excuse to go in and overthrow countries rich in resources. Surely silence in this respect, on this very possibility, must be considered offensive and insulting to all Indigenous Peoples.

Regarding the need to necessity to condemn violence. Ultimately, the individuals and organizations on this list (& those who signed the petitions) need to come to recognize, once and for all, that the violence is all around us.

Ironically, we condemn violence as we participate in it daily.

The violence everyone claims to be against is inherently built into the global industrialized economic system. Until we dismantle this system, the violence upon our Earth and against those most vulnerable will never stop. We all have blood on our hands. If you support the industrialized capitalist system / or ‘green’ capitalism, then you actually do support such violence. The global economic system is violence that must be condemned rather than celebrated and worshipped. The imperative to dismantle the unjust violent economic system should be the key element within the platform/mandate of [removed].

Instead we talk about ‘green’ capitalism, fair-trade diamonds, electric cars, etc. ignoring the massive inequalities we no longer even seem to see. The wealthy 15% creating 85% of the emissions expects to live this way – while everyone else is expected to clamour for the scraps. Does anyone really believe there is anyone on this planet who actually wants to mine or the other horrible jobs that kill you by the time you are 40 – all to supply the wealthy with their wants?

And now, upon reflection over the past few days, I would like to point out some major hypocrisies that I find very unsettling. Is it right that privileged people feel they can tell people with no road – that they should not have a road (or anything else for that matter) when they themselves drive & fly anywhere they want, anytime they want with full access to anything they need or want.

We have approximately 12 of the 64 groups opposed to the road – 52 in favour (from what I have read). Many Indigenous people in support of the road were quoted as saying they wished for access to basic essential services like medicine/hospitals and that the road would provide this.

It feels like this: "Don’t touch any of that rainforest because I have a reality tour booked there for my next annual vacation!" or "Since we’ve destroyed that majority of the world’s forests through our own insatiable consumption and an economic model that destroys most everything (while exploiting your people and our shared planet) don’t touch the forests that we cannot personally access – especially if it is for your gain and not ours."

Then the Avaaz signers & all the others who are outraged run out to Home Depot and buy a new FSC (scam) picnic table on sale for 99.00 because last year’s doesn’t really look that good anymore.

Question: Why have all the organizations that have never had anything to do with the People’s Agreement, all of a sudden become so interested in the rights of the Indigenous of Bolivia? If they are so interested – would they not endorse the People’s agreement and work like mad promoting it? Will they do this now?

And let’s not forget – it’s ok to cut down your Amazon in order to provide meat to the rich countries – but don’t worry – we won’t bring that up. And even if we do bring it up, we still won’t work towards ending the industrial livestock industry. (because we are not prepared to educate nor campaign on the necessity to slow down meat consumption in wealthy countries – we polled on this question and the public did not like it! – bad for the brand! Bad for funding!)

Who does everyone think is eating all the soybeans grown in Bolivia? Of course it all for the wealthy countries. But the soybeans are not enough. We are taking all the quinoa too. (Tough luck if the Bolivian people no longer have their staple food.)

So, wealthy countries won’t slow down on our own consumption/growth but we expect/demand struggling countries like Bolivia to stop production/export – when they are made purposely poor at the hands of the industrialized global capitalist system.

A final note – Sandy states (message inserted below): "As an indigenous man who was in Cochabamba I have to say I did not that there was accusations that some indigenous voices were excluded and noted it with concern but then I also noted that all the big NGOs were there were more concerned with getting their own advocates (usually non indigenos0 to the meeting than in funding any indigenous voices from around the world to attend. The Pacific in particular fdared really badly in this respect."

This has been brought up many times on the list. Why is there never any response? Why is it always the same people (usually those who have access to funding) that attend these meetings?

Lastly – yes – it was absolutely shitty and unjust that the group in Cochabamba was excluded.

Bolivia: US worked to divide social movements, WikiLeaks shows

Bolivia: US worked to divide social movements, WikiLeaks shows

Sunday, September 18, 2011

By Federico Fuentes

WikiLeaks’ release of cables from the United States embassy in La Paz has shed light on its attempts to create divisions in the social and indigenous movements that make up the support base of the country’s first indigenous-led government.

The cables prove the embassy sought to use the US government aid agency, USAID, to promote US interests.

A March 6, 2006, cable titled “Dissent in Evo’s ranks” reports on a meeting only months after Morales’ inauguration as president in December 2005 with “a social sectors leader” from the altiplano (highlands) region in the west.

The social leader was said to have links with the radical federation of neighbourhood councils in El Alto (Fejuve), the coca growers union in Los Yungas and a peasant organisation in La Paz.

Many of these organisations, in particular Fejuve, spearheaded the wave of revolt that overthrew two pro-US neoliberal presidents in 2003 and 2005. It was also crucial to the election of Morales.

Despite viewing these sectors as “traditionally confrontational organisations”, then-ambassador David Greenlee believed that: “Regardless of [US] policy direction in Bolivia, working more closely with these social sector representatives” who were expressing dissent towards Morales “seems to be most beneficial to [US government] interests”.

Another cable from February 25, 2008 reports on a meeting then-US ambassador Philip Goldberg held with “indigenous leaders (particularly leaders of the eastern lowlands)”.

Most of Bolivia’s two largest indigenous peoples, the Aymaras and Quechuas, live in the highlands and central regions.

The east is home to the remaining 34 indigenous peoples. It is also home to the gas transnationals and large agribusiness.

The east was the focal point of right-wing movements that tried to overthrow Morales.

In the cable, great attention is paid to the “growing tensions” between Aymaras and Quechuas on one hand and the lowlands-based indigenous groups “who feel neglected by a self-proclaimed-Aymara, cocalero president”.

An October 17, 2007, cable titled “Indigenous cohesion cracking in Bolivia” reported that
a leader from the National Council of Ayllus and Markas of Qollasuyu (CONAMAQ), which groups together 16 rural indigenous organisations in the altiplano, told embassy officials the Morales government was simply using indigenous peoples for to promote its “goal of socialism [which] does not coincide with ‘true indigenous’ goals”.

The US embassy’s heightened interest in all things “indigenous” following decades of supporting governments that repressed and excluded them is explained in a February 6, 2007, cable.

In it, Goldberg said that “only a leftist government that includes indigenous interests … would have a chance to govern divisive Bolivia”.

Since “a right-wing government would likely lead to greater conflict”, the ability to reach out to indigenous leaders inclined to support US interests was necessary.

For this reason, Goldberg concluded his February 25, 2008, cable by stating that meetings with “indigenous leaders outside of the dominant Aymara and Quechua communities will provide useful information and demonstrate that the United States is interested in views of all indigenous peoples”.

An important tool used for reaching out to indigenous communities is USAID.

A January 28, 2008 cable said USAID social programs aimed at the “poorest and marginalized groups” would prove hard for the government to attack. The cable ends by saying USAID programs should “also seek to counteract anti-USG [US government] rhetoric…”

This was facilitated via funding to independent radio journalists to report on “the benefits of USG assistance to rural communities” and various workshops held in indigenous communities.

A June 15, 2009, cable revealed US concerns at its ability to achieve its aims by working directly with the government.

It noted “anti-US attitudes in key leadership positions” and “nationalistic bristling over being treated with ‘dignity’”.

The cable cited Bolivian government opposition to the US agricultural attache having veto powers over proposed programs.

Government officials’ recent talk of expelling USAID for their subversive activities may pose a more immediate threat to US imperialism realising its goals in Bolivia.

http://www.greenleft.org.au/node/48865

Whose Side Is the United Nations On?

Taking Strong Action For Capitalist-Led Environmental Destruction

by Michael Barker

July 28th, 2010

Capital is more than happy to enlist the mainstream [environmental] movement as a partner in the management of nature. Big environmental groups offer capital a threefold convenience: as legitimation, reminding the world that the system works; as control over popular dissent, a kind of sponge that sucks up and constrains the ecological anxiety in the general population; and as rationalization, a useful governor to introduce some control and protect the system from its own worst tendencies, while ensuring the orderly flow of profits.

– Joel Kovel, 20021

Global capitalist elites have long been masters of the exploitation of labour to manage sustained destruction of life. With utmost concern for shareholders, the principles of scientific management have been used to shackle workers to corporate priorities to efficiently harvest planet earth. In this way, humane citizens are socialized to accept absurd capitalist growth imperatives as natural, which enables the wealth of human energy to be channelled into the eradication of nature. Moreover, in this world of inverted realities, radical alternatives to this toxic state of affairs are regularly considered to contradict true human nature; so we are told it is natural to submit to arbitrary authority and let a tiny elite profit from the corporate management of life. This, however, does not prevent ordinary people from resisting such brutality. Indeed, throughout history ruling elites have been kept busy devising more effective ways of containing such dissent, and so this article will review some of the most significant elite-driven environmental initiatives that have served such purposes (from the 1960s onwards).

By highlighting the way by which elites, working hand in glove with the United Nations, have sought to manage the environmental terrain to disable radical movements seeking to eradicate capitalism, it is hoped that individual readers will recognize the futility of putting their hope in the hands of such illegitimate environmental managers. Only then, when such false illusions have been shattered, will mass movements driven by radical analyses be able to begin to work to sustain life in a just and equitable fashion.

Ending the Nuclear Threat? And the Birth of a Movement

Environmental historian John McCormick suggests that it “is credible” that the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (1963) was the first global environmental agreement.2 Yet paradoxically, as peace historians Frances McCrea and Gerald Markle observe, this important agreement marked the point at which “the tide of peace activism began to ebb,” such that “nuclear testing, [now] widely perceived as an environmental and health issue rather than one of disarmament, was now a non-issue.” In fact, the sad reality is that once this pioneering global environmental agreement had been signed “American nuclear testing — conducted underground where the U.S. enjoyed a technological advantage — greatly accelerated.”3 The conservation movement thus ironically celebrates the advent of an environmental agreement that coincided with the weakening of the global peace movement; that is, the single strongest movement that challenging the legitimacy of the largest source of pollution, war.

Following the signing of the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, McCormick writes that the “idea of universal threats to the environment” was then “further reinforced” with the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic book Silent Spring (Hamilton, 1963). Here, to his credit, McCormick points out that Murray Bookchin had published his groundbreaking book Our Synthetic Environment six months earlier (to “relative failure”), observing that the key difference between the two books was that Carson’s “concentrated on a single issue” (pesticide overuse), while Bookchin’s “examined a broad range of the incidental effects of modern technology, from air pollution to contaminated milk.”4 Understandably, simple uni-focal environmental issues that failed to implicate all aspects of capitalism’s destruction of the world’s flora and fauna were clearly easier for capitalists to integrate and co-opt than systemic critiques such as those offered by more radical analysts like Bookchin.

With imperial wars ensuring total devastation of land and millions of people, concern for the environment gathered momentum throughout the 1960s, especially within liberal political elite circles. For example, in July 1965…

… Adlai Stevenson (then US ambassador to the United Nations) gave a speech before the UN Economic and Social Council in Geneva on the problems of urbanisation throughout the world. In the speech (originally drafted by Barbara Ward), he used the metaphor of the earth as a spaceship on which humanity travelled dependent on its vulnerable supplies of air and soil. (p.80)

Here it is critical to observe that Barbara Ward went on to play a key role in driving the corporate environmental agenda, and before her death in 1981, Ward had served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation-backed Conservation Foundation.

Blame the People!

Something had to be done to save the environment, and as Katherine Barkley and Steve Weissman point out in their classic 1970 article “The Eco- Establishment,” the “elite resource planners took as their model for action the vintage 1910 American conservation movement, especially its emphasis on big business cooperation with big government.” The Conservation Foundation was a leading member of the eco-establishment and helped (amongst various other propaganda duties) to prepare the congressional background paper for the 1968 hearings on National Policy on Environmental Quality, a paper that explicitly laid out how elites planned “to pick the pocket of the consumer to pay for the additional costs they will be faced with” as a result of capitalism’s inherent destructiveness. Elite conservation groups and the mass media quickly ensured that population growth, not capitalism, was portrayed as the major threat to life, and in 1968 the Sierra Club (under the guidance of David Brower) published the work of the “unashamed neo-Malthusian” Paul Ehrlich as The Population Bomb, which “became one of the best-selling environmental books of all time.”5

Later, elite environmentalists adopted a faux-holistic approach to aid them in their efforts to manage the environment, which resulted in another widely celebrated neo-Malthusian book, The Limits to Growth (Club of Rome, 1972). McCormick writes how the roots of this book “went back to the late 1940s, when Jay Forrester, a professor of management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), pioneered the application of the digital computer, tactical military decision making, and information-feedback systems to studies of the interacting forces of social systems.” These ideas were then picked up by Aurelio Peccei, an Italian management consultant and president of Olivetti, who in 1968 “convened a meeting in Rome of a group of 30 economists, scientists, educationalists, and industrialists,” which subsequently became known as the Club of Rome. Under the remit of this elite “Club” Forrester recruited Dennis Meadows who authored The Limits to Growth.6 Club of Rome critics, Robert Golub and Joe Townsend, write:

The arguments of Limits imply the need for an international body to regulate the global economy, but the need for such a body grew out of the intrinsic instability of the world’s economy — as was recognized earlier by many students of the multinational corporation. The growth and spread of multinational corporations in the sixties outstripped the abilities of national governments to regulate and control the global economic system. Given enough foresight one might even have expected that the inability of governments to regulate the world economy in the face of the increasing economic power of the multinational corporations would be most evident in those countries (such as Italy) whose governments, because of their weakness, had the most difficulty in protecting their native capital.7

Priming the Environmental Movement

In 1971 two meetings were held in preparation for the forthcoming United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (otherwise known as the Stockholm Conference), the first in Founex, Switzerland, and the second in Canberra, Australia. The Founex meeting was convened by Maurice Strong, then director-general of the Canadian External Aid Office, who was subsequently “appointed secretary-general of the Stockholm conference, and headed a 27-nation Preparatory Committee set up to make plans for Stockholm and to draw up an agenda.”8 Significantly, in the preparatory meetings “Strong had constantly emphasised the compatibility of development and environmental quality in his preparatory talks with LDC [Less-Developed Counties] governments.” These consensus-making talks ensured that any controversies were aired prior to the main event so that the actual conference could be managed more efficiently: “Differences of opinion remained, but they did not polarise the conference irretrievably.”

Another important tool that helped solidify a political consensus at Stockholm was an “unofficial report that would provide Stockholm delegates with the intellectual and philosophical foundation for their deliberations” that was commissioned by Strong and co-authored by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos (and then reviewed by a committee of 152 consultants).9 Funding for this report was provided by the Albert Schweitzer Chair at Columbia University, the World Bank, and the Ford Foundation.10 This report was later published as Only One Earth (Norton & Company, 1972) “by a new research institute, the International Institute for Environmental Affairs (IIEA), set up in 1972 under the sponsorship of the Aspen Institute.”11 The IIEA had already played an important role in the pre-conference preparations, and so it is significant that the “philosophical foundations of IIEA lay in the results of a four-month feasibility study conducted in February-May 1970 by the Anderson Foundation.”

IIEA’s cochairman, Robert O. Anderson (chairman of Atlantic Richfield and the seed funder of the Institute), believed that the institute should “steer a steady mid-course between doom and gloom alarmists and those who resist acknowledging the clear danger to which the human environment is being subjected.”12

Anderson was, and still is, a powerful oil executive, with excellent contacts in the broader corporate world, having formerly served as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas (1961-4) and on the board of directors of other well-known corporate giants like Chase Manhattan Bank, the Columbia Broadcasting System, and Weyerhaeuser Company. In 1974 Anderson was chair of the Rockefeller’s Resources for the Future, sitting alongside fellow board member and fellow oil profiteer Maurice Strong, who served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation from 1971 until 1977.13

The United Capitalists’ Environment Programme

After Stockholm Maurice Strong went on to found and head the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and in 1973 “he appointed senior staff from the areas he knew best: business, politics and international public service.” Strong remained as UNEP’s head for nearly three years, after which he was appointed president, chairman, and CEO of Canada’s national oil company, Petro-Canada.14 However, despite UNEP’s corporate approach to organizing, funding “has been a continuing problem,” and during its first eight years the United States was the single largest supporter of their work, contributing some 36 percent of the operating costs.15 Thus one can understand why UNEP, working in coordination with groups like the IUCN (now known as the World Conservation Union), adopted a highly conservative approach to environmental management. Of course funding obtained from liberal foundations helped ensure that already conservative organizations did not stray far from elite agendas. Raymond Dasmann…

… recalls that, at the time he joined IUCN in 1970 as a senior staff ecologist, there had been three changes in the Union: it had new leadership, a new organisational structure, and had been given a major grant from the Ford Foundation. Ford had suggested the need for more centralised control by IUCN headquarters over its activities. … A more significant development noted by Dasmann was the shift in emphasis at IUCN towards a concern for economic development; for example, conservation and development was the theme of the 1972 IUCN General Assembly in Banff, Canada. (p.196)

Three years after UNEP was established, “UNEP asked IUCN to prepare a wildlife conservation strategy,” and Dasmann and Duncan Poore spent the next few years working on drafts of this critical policy document. Lee Talbot, who went on to head the IUCN, “recall[ed] that ‘the first draft was essentially a wildlife textbook’, but that each subsequent draft brought the previously opposing views of developers and conservationists closer together, and that the final draft was a consensus between the two points of view.”16 Then in 1977, with UNEP funding, the IUCN set about preparing a World Conservation Strategy report.17

Published in March 1980 under the principal authorship of Robert Prescott-Allen, the IUCN’s World Conservation Strategy was by the admission of its authors, a compromise which attempted to establish an “accommodation between conservation and development.” On the one hand the authors of the report…

… recognized that conservation and development should be promoted as compatible objectives. On the other, by limiting itself to the conservation of nature and natural resources, the Strategy paid little heed to the fact that the problems faced by the natural environment are part of the broader issues related to the human environment.18

McCormick correctly points out that “The two cannot be divorced.” Yet they were, thus providing a solid ideological base for subsequent pro-capitalist means of managing the environment, which were quickly realised through the work budding “conservation” biologists and by the World Commission on Environment and Development (otherwise known as the Brundtland Commission).

Sustainable Development for Ecological Imperialism

Convened by the United Nations in 1983, and chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the Brundtland Commission held its first meeting in 1984, with funding provided by various foreign governments and liberal foundations, including not least the Ford Foundation.19 The secretary-general of the Brundtland Commission (1983-7) and lead author of the Commission’s most famous report, Our Common Future, Jim MacNeill, happened to be the former chair of the International Institute for Sustainable Development — a group whose current president, David Runnallis, had in the 1970s, worked with Barbara Ward to found the International Institute for Environment and Development. Thus it is wholly fitting that Maurice Strong was counted on as an important member of the Brundtland Commission.20

The Brundtland Commission’s report Our Common Future (Oxford University Press, 1987) is perhaps most famous for popularizing the misnomer of sustainable development. On this rhetorical success, Brian Tokar observes:

Merging the language of long-term sustainability from the environmental movement with the “development” discourse of neo-colonialism, sustainable development became a rationale for advocating the continued expansion of capitalist market economies in the global South, while paying lip service to the needs of the environment and the poor.21

Consequently, it should come as little surprise that the Brundtland Commission’s report failed to incorporate an “analysis of the military-industrial complex and its role in industrial development.” Moreover, as Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger point out, the chapter of the Brundtland report on peace and security “leads the Brundtland Commission to propose a military kind of international management of environmental problems and resources, the so-called commons.”22 This militaristic logic was extended in 1989 by then World Resources Institute vice president, Jessica Matthews, whose Malthusian article “Redefining Security” played an important role in “set[ting] the stage for the linking of environment and security.” Incidentally, the elite stronghold, that is the World Resources Institute, also happened to have been commissioned by UNDP (in 1987) to make policy recommendations based on the Brundtland Commission’s conclusions. This advice in turn eventually led to the creation of the World Bank-initiated Global Environmental Facility (GEF), which was initially chaired and then headed by one of World Resources Institute’s senior vice presidents, Mohamed El-Ashry.23 The GEF was of course an integral part of the eco-establishment, and as Zoe Young points out, it has succeeded “divid[ing] activists willing to play along with the US and [World] Bank’s strategic agenda from those who will not; the latter can be dismissed as extreme and unconstructive, while the former’s skills and passion can be channelled through GEF processes to extend the reach of corporate capital and culture.”24 Given such outcomes it should come as no surprise that in 1990 the World Resources Institute “issued a study purporting to show that underdeveloped nations of the global South — especially China, India, and Brazil-pumped as much carbon dioxide into the biosphere as the developed countries of the North.” The evident absurdity of such conclusions was highlighted by Mark Dowie, but despite the reports illogic, Dowie correctly noted how: “As a justification for environmental imperialism, it will surely be used to formulate aid and multinational lending policies for years to come.”25

A Corporate Earth Summit

Such elitist precedents demonstrate the success the eco-establishment has had in effectively seizing control of the mainstream environmental agenda. So, as Chatterjee and Finger suggest, while “[o]verall, the Stockholm Conference was characterized by heavy confrontation between activists of all sorts and governments” (which is itself debatable) this phenomenon was certainly not to be repeated at the Rio Earth Summit (otherwise known as the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, or UNCED). Indeed, they continue that at Rio “the overall climate was one of consensus and cooperation”;26 a result that should hardly be considered surprising given that the secretary-general of the Summit was Maurice Strong. (Strong’s senior advisor at the Earth Summit was former congresswoman and Women’s Environment and Development Organization co-founder Bella Abzug.) Chatterjee and Finger conclude:

Rather than developing a new vision in line with the challenges of global ecology, UNCED… rehabilitated technological progress and other cults of efficiency. Rather than coming up with creative views on global governance, UNCED has rehabilitated the development institutions and organizations as legitimate agents to deal with new global challenges. These include the Bretton Woods institutions and the UN, as well as the national governments and the multinational corporations. And, finally, rather than making the various stakeholders collaborate and collectively learn our way out of the global crisis, UNCED has coopted some, divided and destroyed others, and promoted the ones who had the money to take advantage of this combined public relations and lobbying exercise. (p.173)

Likewise, Michael Goldman writes that:

If we are to learn anything from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio… it is that the objective of the Summit’s major power brokers was not to constrain or restructure capitalist economies and practices to help save the rapidly deteriorating ecological commons, but rather to restructure the commons (e.g. privatize, “develop,” “make more efficient,” valorize, “get the price right”) to accommodate crisis-ridden capitalisms. The effect has not been to stop destructive practices but to normalize and further institutionalize them.27

The business co-option of the Earth Summit had of course been a long time coming. Indeed, the “sustainable” business community had begun organizing in earnest in 1984 following the first World Industry Conference on Environmental Management: a forum that eventually led to the creation of a Business Council for Sustainable Development on the eve of the Earth Summit. Timothy Doyle observes how:

As the 1980s wore on environmental antagonists looked to other less conflictual means of securing their future power. No longer did many business interests across the globe deny the existence of environmental damage caused, in part, to their own malpractices. Their ploy changed: to beat the environmentalists at their own game (but on newly defined terms and agendas); to subvert them, to divide them, to supplant them, to appear to be greener than the green.28

The formation of the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD) is particularly interesting as the organizations two cofounders were Maurice Strong and the Swiss billionaire industrialist, Stephan Schmidheiny29 — a friend of Strong’s from his days at the Davos World Economic Forum (which Strong had chaired). According to critics, this group was part of “a strategy to dislodge the United Nations Center on Transnational Corporations as it moved towards enforceable rules governing the operations of multinational corporations.” Indeed, as Joshua Karliner observed, one particularly significant outcome from the Earth Summit was the “agile and successful endeavor to virtually silence all discussion among governments about the need for international regulation and control of global corporations in the name of sustainable development.” In this regard, Karliner writes that one “of the first obstacles that the corporate diplomats from the [International Chamber of Commerce] and the BCSD had to overcome was a branch of the United Nations itself — the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC).” Problematically it seems, the United Nations Economic and Social Council had asked the Centre to “prepare a set of recommendations on transnationals and other large industrial enterprises that governments might use when drafting the Earth Summit’s central document,” Agenda 21, which were to be submitted in March 1992. Yet the month before this date, the then UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali (1992-7)…

… announced that the UNCTC would be eliminated as an independent entity. This move in effect gutted the agency of what little power it might have had. But it still had the report commissioned by ECOSOC to deliver to Maurice Strong and his UNCED Secretariat. Try as it might, however, the UNCTC couldn’t get the Secretariat to accept its report. Meanwhile, Strong had appointed Stephan Schmidheiny as his senior industry advisor. Schmidheiny proceeded to form the BCSD and prepare Changing Course as an official industry submission to UNCED.30

But his was not the only way in which the United Nations had actively served elite interests at the Earth Summit, as they simultaneously acted to subtly co-opt the very nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that provided radical criticisms of the entire event. Thus according to Chatterjee and Finger, UNDP spent US$475,000 on sponsoring NGOs in 1990 and 1991, and “then US$206,000 in the final six months up to and including Rio.” And from these funding initiatives “sprang two major drives among the Southern country NGOS,” the Third World Network, and Maximo Kalaw’s Green Forum of the Philippines. Subsequently while the Third World Network “directed [most of their criticisms] against the World Bank, the IMF, GATT, and of course the USA” they “were silent about UNDP.” This was a critical omission on their part given the integral role that the United Nations has played, and continues to fulfil, in legitimizing and promoting neoliberalism. Indeed, the extent of cooperation between UNDP and the Third World Network meant that the latter was even privately briefed “on the key issues that the World Bank could be swayed on.”31

Given the Third World Network’s uncritical stance towards the United Nations, it is fitting that Martin Khor, who formerly led this Network since its inception in 1984, is now a member of the United Nations Committee on Development Policy. Moreover as of March 2009, Khor has been the executive director of the South Center — a group whose board of directors was chaired by the former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros Ghali from 2003 until 2006. (Khor had previously served on the South Center’s board of directors from 1996 until 2002.) Incidentally, the current chair of the South Center is the former President of Tanzania, Benjamin Mkapa, who is presently also a trustee of the democracy-manipulating African Wildlife Foundation; while prior to Boutros Boutros Ghali’s chairmanship of the board, Gamani Corea served in this position, which is interesting given that he chaired Maurice Strong’s Founex Panel of experts in 1971 in preparation for the 1972 Stockholm Conference. Returning to Khor’s background, it is also worth adding that he is also a board member of the International Forum on Globalization, a group that has been heavily supported by Ted Turner and Douglas Tompkins’ controversial eco-philanthropy.

From Earth Summit to Earth Mining

When Maurice Strong’s tenure as secretary-general of the Earth Summit ended (in 1992) “he became the chairman of the organizing committee for the Earth Council.” The Council’s mission was to “support and empower people in building a more secure, equitable and sustainable future” and at the invitation of the Costa Rican government their Secretariat was established in San José, Costa Rica, in September 1992. Amongst others sitting alongside Strong on the initial organizing committee for this group was Stephan Schmidheiny.32 Now known as the Earth Council Alliance, their chair is Tommy Short (who is also a council member of Earth Charter International);33 ) while their president, former Imperial Chemical Industries executive, Marcelo Carvalho de Andrade, is the founder and chairperson of Pro-Natura, which “was started in Brazil in 1985 and by 1992 had become one of the very first ‘Southern’ NGOs to be internationalised following the Rio Conference.” Marcelo de Andrade additionally serves as a board member of the controversial group Counterpart International, and on the board of Earth Restoration Corps (which is headed by Maurice Strong’s wife Hanne Strong).

To this day, Strong’s dedication to corporate liberalism remains strong, and in the wake of the Earth Summit he took up the chairmanship of both the World Resources Institute and the Stockholm Environment Institute. Then in 1999, Strong, the former CEO of Petro-Canada, felt it was time to retire from the board of directors of the oil and gas company Cordex Petroleums — a company that had been managed by his son, Fred Strong. That said, despite maintaining his commitment to managing the environment, Strong continues to enjoy harvesting the planet, as he is a board member of Wealth Minerals Ltd — an organization that describes itself as “a well financed and managed leader in uranium exploration focused on identifying world-class discoveries in Argentina.”34

Solutions

While this article has clearly demonstrated that the global “environmental” management championed by Maurice Strong poses a significant threat to life on planet earth, Strong is by no means the main problem. Instead, Strong is merely a brilliant example of the breed of two-faced technocrats that have arisen to sustain capitalism and protect wildlife (but only where it is deemed profitable). However, by tracking Strong’s stewardship of capitalist interests historically — as this article has done — it is possible to demystify the grotesque global circus that has grown over the years to ostensibly save the environment. Elite institutions like the United Nations must be superseded: something that is unlikely to happen until we collectively start channelling mental resources to describing suitable alternatives: Communism anyone?

1. Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature: The End of Capitalism or the End of the World (Zed, 2002), p.154. Kovel continues: “Foundations tend to be created by rich people to soften the contradictions of that which enabled the rich to become so in the first place, and are basically no further from capital than the state. Like the state, the foundation is relatively free to express a more universal interest — and some of them are, like religion in Marx’s view, the ‘heart of a heartless world’, and able to support marginal or even radical projects. However, taken all in all, the foundation’s basic function is to rationalize the given society and not to overturn it.” (p.154) [?]
2. John McCormick, The Global Environmental Movement (Wiley, 1995), p.64. [?]
3. Frances McCrea and Gerald Markle, Minutes to Midnight: Nuclear Weapons Protest in America (Sage, 1989), p.81-2. [?]
4. McCormick, p.65, p.67. [?]
5. McCormick, p.84. As an aside McCormick adds: “Curiously, a remarkably similar book published three years before — The Silent Explosion by Philip Appleman, a professor of English at Indiana University — sold well, but achieved nothing like the impact. Ehrlich made no reference to Appleman’s work.” [?]
6. McCormick, p.90. Another book, A Blueprint for Survival, which was published in The Ecologist in early 1972, concerned itself with similar themes and was influenced by The Limits to Growth. [?]
7. Robert Golub and Joe Townsend, “Malthus, multinationals and the Club of Rome,” Social Studies of Science, 7, (1977), p.202. “Our argument is that, during the decade of the sixties, the international economic (and many national financial) systems became increasingly unstable and the systems by which the advanced countries control and dominate the underdeveloped countries were growing more fragile…, at the same time as (and in some cases as a result of) the multinational firms were becoming more significant in the international and national economies. These increasing instabilities and uncertainties made the economic environment more threatening to the multinational firms themselves, and this situation was initially and most strongly perceived by those ’second rank’ multinationals whose governments were too weak to adequately provide the ‘public functions’ listed by Murray. As a result of this, the Forrester and Meadows ’scientific’ studies were commissioned as ‘tools of communication and control’ to operate the ‘transmission pulley’ of public opinion in order to force the governments of the industrialized societies to institute a ‘new world moderator’ (with ’stern rules about voting’) which would have sufficient power to stabilize the international economic situation and ensure a constant supply of raw materials.” (p.216) [?]
8. McCormick, p.113. [?]
9. McCormick, p.116-7. [?]
10. Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos, Only One Earth (Norton & Company, 1972), p.ix.

Ward and Dubos write: “Ambassador Adlai Stevenson clearly had in mind the overpowering influence of man’s role in determining the quality of the environment and therefore of human life when, in his last speech before the Economic and Social Council in Geneva on July 9, 1965, he referred to the earth as a little spaceship on which we travel together, ‘dependent on its vulnerable supplies of earth and soil.’” (p.xvii-iii) Barbara Ward neglects to mention that she drafted the content of this speech. [?]

11. In 1973, Barbara Ward then became president of the Institute, which was renamed as the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). [?]
12. McCormick, p.118. [?]
13. In 1978 Anderson received the inaugural Lindbergh Award, an honor that has since then been graced on most of the world’s leading corporate environmentalists. For instance, in 1979 the award was given to Aurelio Peccei, and then to Maurice Strong in 1981. Eco-baron Ted Turner received the award in 2008, and in 2009 he was followed by Lester Brown. [?]
14. Maurice Strong served as a vice president of conservative WWF International (1978-81), and a member of the executive council until December 1986, and as a chairman of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, IUCN (now known as the World Conservation Union). [?]
15. McCormick, p.137, p.136. [?]
16. McCormick, p.196-7. [?]
17. “The final drafting was guided by Robert Allen (one of the authors of the Blueprint for Survival, and then IUCN head of publications) and David Munro IUCN’s director-general.” McCormick, p.197. It is worth citing the comments of influential environmental manager and former president of both the Club of Rome and of the IUCN, Ashok Khosla. He notes:

“In the late 1970s, I was one of the contributing authors of the World Conservation Strategy, which made extensive use of the word Sustainable Development for, I believe, the first time. It was produced by the World Conservation Union in collaboration with the United Nation Environment Programme and WWF. WCS was liberally sprinkled throughout with the concept of sustainable development. It was launched “simultaneously” in major cities of the world as the sun came up to 10.00 am at each of them, starting with New Delhi on 5 March 1980.

“Later I worked with Brundtland Commission. It adopted this phrase as the central message of its report, and helped to make it globally accepted. From there it became the theme of the 1992 Johannesburg Summit.” [?]

18. John McCormick, “The origins of the World Conservation Strategy,” Environmental Review: ER, 10 (3), Autumn 1986, p.186. [?]
19. In 1988 Gro Harlem Brundtland received the annual Third World Prize of $100,000 from the Third World Foundation. Here it is interesting to note that the Third World Foundation was set up by Altaf Gauhar, along with the academic journal, Third World Quarterly, with funding provided by the CIA-connected Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

For a recent critique of the BCCI, see Lucy Komisar, “BCCI’s Double Game: Banking on America, Banking on Jihad,” In: Steven Hiatt (ed), A Game As Old As Empire: The Secret World of Economic Hit Men and the Web of Global Corruption (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007). [?]

20. During the 1980s both Brundtland and Strong had been board members of Ted Turner’s Better World Society: another influential trustee of this Society was Monkombu Swaminathan, the former IUCN president and World Resources Institute trustee — who served as the chair of the Brundtland Commission’s Advisory Panel of Food Security in spite or perhaps because of his reputation as the “Father of the Green Revolution in India” — who has been described by UNEP as “the Father of Economic Ecology.”

Other notable members of the Brundtland Commission who had already, or went on to represent, corporate conservation outfits include: Istvan Lang (who is now an honorary board member of Green Cross International), and finally the Brazilian ecologist Paulo Nogueira-Neto (who is an emeritus director of Conservation International, and a former executive board member of the IUCN), Saburo Okita (who at the time served on the executive committee of the Club of Rome, and was chairman of World Wildlife Fund Japan), Shridath Ramphal (who is the former co-chair of the Commission on Global Governance, former president of the IUCN, 1990-3, and former chair of the international steering committee of the Rockefeller Foundation’s Leadership in Environmental and Development), former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator William Ruckelshaus (who is the former chair of the World Resources Institute), Mohamed Sahnoun (who is a board member of the International Institute for Sustainable Development, a council member of Earth Charter International, and is co-chair of the international advisory board of the Global Centre for the Responsibility to Protect), and Janez Stanovnik (who is a former board member of Resources for the Future). The chair of the Commission’s Advisory Panel on Energy was Enrique Iglesias, who went on to serve as the president of the Inter-American Development Bank, and as an honorary member of the Club of Rome. [?]

21. Brian Tokar, “The World Bank: Biotechnology and the ‘Next Green Revolution’,” In: Brian Tokar (ed), Gene Traders: Biotechnology, World Trade, and the Globalization of Hunger (Toward Freedom, 2004), p.51. [?]
22. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, The Earth Brokers: Power, Politics and World Development (Routledge, 1994), p.25. [?]
23. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.152. [?]
24. Zoe Young, “The Politics of GEF,” (pdf) ECO: The Voice of the NGO Community in the International Environmental Conventions, 15 (7), March 2006. [?]
25. Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (MIT Press, 1995), p.119. [?]
26. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.101. They write: “With the exception of one demonstration in Rio de Janeiro which brought together 50,000 people in downtown streets, most protests drew a few dozen people.” (p.101) [?]
27. Michael Goldman, “Inventing the Commons: Theories and Practices of the Commons’ Professional,” In: Michael Goldman (ed), Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons (Pluto Press, 1998), p.23.

In their scathing article published in The Ecologist magazine titled “The Earth Summit Debacle,” they noted how the “best that can be said for the Earth Summit is that is made visible the vested interests standing in the way” of meaningful grassroots action. The Ecologist wrote, that for such grassroots groups “the question is not how the environment should be managed — they have the experience of the past as their guide — but who will manage it and in whose interest. They reject UNCED’s rhetoric of a world where all humanity is united by a common interest in survival, and in which conflicts of race, class, gender and culture are characterised as of secondary importance to humanity’s supposedly common goal.”

Caroline Thomas agrees and in 1993 she noted how: “At the most fundamental level, the causes of environmental degradation have not been addressed, and without this, efforts to tackle the crisis are bound to fail. The crisis is rooted in the process of globalisation under way. Powerful entrenched interests impede progress in understanding the crisis and in addressing it. They marginalise rival interpretations of its origins and thereby block the discovery of possible ways forward … The result is that the crisis is to be tackled by a continuation of the very policies that have largely caused it in the first place.” Cited in David Pepper, Modern Environmentalism: An Introduction (Routledge, 1996), p.105. [?]

28. Timothy Doyle, “Sustainable development and Agenda 21: the secular bible of global free markets and pluralist democracy,” Third World Quarterly, 19 (4), 1998, p.772. Doyle concludes that: “The only force which currently seems capable of moving beyond the boundaries of nation-states in hot pursuit of transnational corporations are social movements and NGOs, also acting through transnational conduits.” (p.785) Doyle evidently is unaware of the extent to which corporate interests have already subverted civil society to serve their antidemocratic neoliberal interests. Here the work of Ellen Meiksins Wood is worth citing at length. She writes:

“The moral force of these movements [organizing against the threat of ‘nuclear
annihilation and ecological disaster’] is unquestionable; but in a sense, the very qualities that give them their particular strength make them resistant to transformation into agents of a fundamental social change, the transition from capitalism to socialism. These movements do not reflect, and are not intended to create, a new collective identity, a new social agency, motivated by a new anti-capitalist interest which dissolves differences of class interest. They are not constituted on the basis of the connections that exist between the capitalist order and the threats to peace and survival. On the contrary, their unity and popular appeal depend upon abstracting the issues of peace or ecology from the prevailing social order and the conflicting social interests that comprise it. The general interests that human beings share simply because they are human must be seen, not as requiring the transformation of the existing social order and class relations, but rather as something detached from the various particular interests in which human beings partake by virtue of belonging to that social order and its system of classes. In other words, such movements have tended to rely on the extent to which they can avoid specifically implicating the capitalist order and its class system.” Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat From Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism (Verso, 1986), p.176. [?]

29. Stephan Schmidheiny is a former board member of the World Resources Institute, and presently serves as a member of board of overseers of the International Center for Economic Growth — a group whose funders include the likes of the Ford Foundation and the Center for International Private Enterprise. Another notable person who sits on this group’s board of overseers is the former Director of the UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Africa, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, who was also the former initial chairperson of George Soros’s democracy-manipulating venture, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa. [?]
30. Joshua Karliner, The Corporate Planet: Ecology and Politics in the Age of Globalization (Sierra Club Books, 1997), p.53. [?]
31. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.102. [?]
32. Pratap Chatterjee and Matthias Finger, p.161. [?]
33. Earth Charter International’s council has three co-chairs: Steven Rockefeller (United States), Razeena Wagiet (South Africa), and Brendan Mackey (Australia). The son of the former vice president of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller, Steven Rockefeller is professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College, and has served as a trustee of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund for twenty-five years (chairing the Fund’s board of trustees from 1998 to 2006). Steven is also a member of the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality’s Global Council on Planetary Ethics and Values, which is home to notables like Ervin Laszlo and Vaclav Havel. The other two co-chairs of the Earth Charter council, like Steven, have similarly elitist backgrounds, as Wagiet has previously worked for WWF South Africa, and thereafter was “appointed as environmental adviser to the previous National Minister of Education, Professor Kader Asmal for four years (1999-2003)”; while Mackey co-chairs the World Conservation Union Ethics Specialist Group. [?]
34. According to his official biography, Wealth Minerals Ltd board member, Paul Matysek, “is the former President and CEO and a co-founder of Energy Metals Corporation. Under Mr. Matysek’s stewardship, Energy Metals Corporation, a pure uranium mining and development company, was recently acquired by Uranium One Inc. in a deal valued at over one billion dollars.” His biography adds that Matysek has formerly served in a senior management at the mining and metals company, First Quantum Minerals Ltd. One notable current board member of First Quantum Minerals is Rupert L. Pennant-Rea, who is a former member of the Group of 30, an international body of leading financiers and academics that was founded in 1978 by the Rockefeller Foundation. [?]

http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/07/taking-strong-action-for-capitalist-led-environmental-destruction/