On Friday, Stop La Parota PDX launched its campaign to pressure companies with ties to the financing of La Parota Dam to sever all connections to the destructive project.
Activists held a colorful demonstration in front of the Lloyd Center Sears to demand the Sears Holding Corporation cut all ties to Grupo Carso. Grupo Carso is the financial umbrella of Mexican billionaire, Carlos Slim Helú, who has publicly declared that Grupo Carso subsidiaries will be involved in every aspect of La Parota.
La Parota, a 765-megawatt hydroelectric dam slated for the Papagayo River in Guerrero, Mexico, is a classic infrastructure expansion project resulting from trade agreements like NAFTA and the FTAA in the worst of ways. The dam would submerge 43,000 acres of forest and farmland along the river's banks, displacing at least 25,000 mostly indigenous campesinos (subsistence farmers) from the Communal Lands of Cacahuatepec. Already, indigenous resistance to the dam has been met with imprisonment and murder.
Far from being a renewable energy source, sediment accumulation limits the electricity generating capacity of dams to 50-100 years. Meanwhile, large dams are significant contributors to global warming. As the tremendous biomass of a tropical forest decays beneath a reservoir, it gives off greenhouse gases. Dams in tropical regions have been shown to produce anywhere from two to 40 times as much carbon dioxide as an equivalent coal-fired plant.
The reason for this blatant exploitation and ecocide? Electricity generated from La Parota would be incorporated into an international energy grid and used to power factory-centers, maquiladoras (export-oriented sweatshop corridors). The phenomenon of seizing indigenous lands and then forcing inhabitants into working for suboptimal wages is not 'economic development,' but a modern version of colonialism.
The CFE made no attempt to include the campesinos in the decision-making process regarding La Parota. In July 2003, without giving notice or seeking permission, the commission simply sent in machinery to build two tunnels to divert the flow of the Papagayo. Farmers from surrounding communities responded with road blockades and encampments to keep CFE equipment out of the area. The ongoing roadblocks have been largely successful, and the CFE has been forced to pull out most of its equipment In Chilpancingo, the state capital, the protesters were 30,000 strong. Their message was clear: "We are ready to die for the land."
The demonstration was held both in solidarity with the resisting campesinos as well as the resistance in Germany to the G8. La Parota is a manifestation of the global system of oppression created by organizations like the G8 to further the interests of transnational corporations at the cost of people and environmental integrity.
|
http://www.rootforce.org
