from Weekly News Update on the Americas

EMBERA INDIGENOUS MASSACRED

On Aug. 17, hooded assailants armed with assault rifles arrived at the home of an indigenous Embera Chami family in the community of Ubarba, in the Nuestra Senora Candelaria de la Montana indigenous reservation in the central Colombian department of Caldas. The assailants shot to death Rosalba Morales and Evelio de Jesus Morales at their home, and severely wounded Jose Abelino Morales, who died on the way to a hospital in Riosucio. An hour after the attack, unidentified assailants murdered William Andres Taborda at his home in the community of Limon, on the same indigenous reservation. (National Indigenous Organization of Colombia--ONIC statement posted Aug. 19 on Colombia Indymedia)

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

HUANCABAMBA: TWO DEAD AT MINING CAMP

In the pre-dawn hours of Aug. 1, some 3,000 to 6,000 residents of campesino communities in northern Peru seized control of the Henry Hills mining camp, owned by the mining company Majaz in El Tambo, Huancabamba province. The campesinos came from Ayabaca and Huacabamba (Piura region) and Paicapampa and San Ignacio (in Jaen province, Cajamarca). Many of them are members of the rondas, campesino self-defense groups formed during the 1980s to combat Maoist rebels. Armed only with sticks and agricultural tools, and a few old back-loading rifles, they quickly surprised and overpowered the camp's guards.

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Aug. 4, residents of the southern Bolivian city of Camiri, in Santa Cruz department, lifted their general strike after Hydrocarbons Minister Jaime Dunn signed an agreement promising to speed up the re-establishment of the state oil company, Yacimientos Petroliferos Fiscales de Bolivia (YPFB). The agreement, reached after eight hours of negotiations, lays out a timetable under which the process will culminate in three weeks. The government also committed to install gas service in 3,800 homes in Camiri by 2006, and to locate the exploration and drilling management headquarters of the newly founded YPFB in Camiri. The re-establishment of the state firm was mandated by a hydrocarbons law enacted by Congress on May 17, but its implementation has been delayed.

from Weekly News Update on the Americas

On Aug. 15, residents of the Amazon provinces of Sucumbios and Orellana in northern Ecuador began an open-ended civic strike--backed by local elected officials--to demand higher wages, more jobs and the construction of roads, schools and health clinics in the region, as well as the cancellation of contracts with two transnational oil companies, the US-based Occidental (OXY) and Canada's EnCana. The Ecuadoran prosecutor's office has legally challenged OXY--the largest private oil producer in Ecuador--for breach of contract, saying it bought some of EnCana's operating rights without the required approval from authorities. The strikers are demanding that OXY abandon Ecuador altogether. Some protest leaders are apparently demanding that the government renegotiate all contracts with foreign oil companies to demand a 50% share of the profits they make in Ecuador; others are demanding the full nationalization of Ecuador's oil. (Adital, Aug. 18; Financial Times, Aug. 19; AFP, Aug. 20)

A Critique of Energy Alternatives

by George Caffentzis

The discussion of energy politics in the US is now dominated by two competing paradigms. One is promoted by the Bush Administration and its corporate allies; the other by a wide assortment of liberal and left-wing NGOs and analysts (and occasionally by corporate supporters of the "Gore-wing" of the Democratic Party including, at times, John Kerry).

by David Bacon

BASRA, Iraq - The cracking towers and gas flares of the Al-Daura oil refinery rise above the neighborhood on Baghdad's outskirts that bears its name. On February 18, Ali Hassan Abd (Abu Fahad), a leader of the refinery's union, was walking home from the Al-Daura Refinery with his young children when gunmen ran up and shot him.

Abu Fahad had been one of 400 union activists who emerged from the underground or returned from exile in May 2003 and at a Baghdad conference formed the Iraqi Federation of Trade Unions. Afterwards, he went back to the refinery and urged his fellow workers to elect department and plant-wide committees. That, in turn, became a nucleus of the Oil and Gas Workers Union, one of the twelve industry unions that make up the IFTU.

by Jacob Mundy

"We preferred that occupation," Salim says, pointing to the Spanish news channel on his television, "to this one," he says gesturing toward Moroccan settlers walking past his West Saharan shop window.