#imfloansharks — Public Fediverse posts

Murders, #megaprojects and a ‘new Panama Canal’ in Mexico

#Activists suspect murders of 15 #Indigenous community members are linked to their opposition to a proposed megaproject.

By Eoin Wilson
Published On 13 Jul 2020

Mexico City, Mexico – "The murders bore all the hallmarks of drug cartel executions. Fifteen victims – all members of the Ikoots Indigenous community – had been beaten, shot, and their bodies burned in a field just outside Huazantlan del Rio, a village in the municipality of San Mateo del Mar in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, in late June. An as-yet-unknown number of people were also 'disappeared'.

"At first the local government, headed by Mayor Bernardino Ponce Hinojosa, blamed the killings on a shadowy figure and an unnamed organised-crime group. Officials also acknowledged intra-community grievances and political infighting, caused by dissatisfaction with municipal elections and tension over last October’s mayoral election, which Ponce Hinojosa won.

"San Mateo used to be governed by an Indigenous 'popular assembly', which made decisions by consensus and served on a one-year rotation. But in 2017, this changed to a ballot-based electoral approach, leading to tensions that increased after the mayor’s disputed 2019 win.

"The Ikoots, most of whom consider the popular assembly to be the legitimate source of authority in the region, allege that the vote was fraudulent. They also accuse the mayor and a local businessman of being complicit in the wave of violence, sources told Al Jazeera, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.

"Meanwhile, a collective of 15 civil society and teachers’ organisations, the National Coordination of Education Workers (CNTE), has accused the Cartel de Jalisco Nueva Generacion (CJNG) – one of Mexico’s most violent and territorially-ambitious cartels – of committing the murders.

"The allegations came in the same week that the CJNG was accused of the attempted assassination of Mexico City’s chief of police in an ambush with heavy weapons in which three people were killed.

"Although CNTE gave no evidence to support its accusation, many in San Mateo believe the claims because the cartel had already been active in their Istmo region, which boasts a wealth of mineral resources and a strategic location.

"The Istmo (or Isthmus in English) spans the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz at the narrowest point between the Pacific and the Atlantic. It is the site of the controversial 'Interoceanic' or 'Transistmico' corridor project, initiated by the government of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador and opposed by many Indigenous communities."

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2020/7/13/murders-megaprojects-and-a-new-panama-canal-in-mexico

#Ikoots #IndigenousActivists #MegaInfrastructureProjects #CarbonIntensive #MegaCorridors #SDGs #CIIT #GulfOfMexico #IMFLoanSharks #SacrificeZones #CulturalGenocide #CulturalErasism #EnvironmentalDegradation #EnvironmentalDamage #Capitalism #CorporateColonialism #IndigenousPeoples #CulturalSurvival #Oaxaca #Veracruz #IndigenousCulture #ExtractiveIndustries #InteroceanicCorridor #TransistmicoCorridor #Istmo #IsthmusOfTehuantepec #Tehuntepec

From the Bretton Woods Project: #Forests

"Finally, the [#WorldBank] ’s #forest policy and #WeakSafeguards on #ForestProtection have also been observed to infringe the rights of local communities and have failed to protect one of the planet’s most important ‘#CarbonSinks’ (see Observer Spring 2017). CSOs have called for the Bank to open up its Forest Notes – which are meant to guide the interface between its lending and forests – to consultation (see Observer Winter 2017-2018). CSOs have also been highly critical of one of the forest initiatives the Bank manages, the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), a climate investment fund that supports Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) projects. A March 2017 post in REDD Monitor called the FCPF, 'the most cost-inefficient tree-saving scheme ever,' owing to high administrative costs between fiscal years 2009-2015 absorbing 64 per cent of FCFP’s $55 million expenditure. More generally, the Bank’s overall approach to lending has undermined the protection of vital natural ecosystems in borrower countries. As noted by Bruce Rich in his influential 2013 book, Foreclosing the Future: The World Bank and the Politics of Environmental Destruction, 'When one examines the failures to conserve ecosystems, or to mitigate environmental impacts of development, one finds that failed governance at all levels is almost invariably at the root. …Many of [the Bank’s] problems are associated with a dysfunctional institutional culture in which the relentless pressure to move money out the door, even in violation of the Bank’s own policies and rules, often overrides all other considerations.'"

2017: World Bank policy lending undermines climate goals

"One of the main problems is the Bank’s refusal to adequately assess the social and environmental risks of their policy loans" - Harlem Mariño, Derechos, Ambiente y Recursos Naturales

6 April 2017

"A late January report by US-based NGO Bank Information Center (BIC), together with partners in Egypt, Indonesia, Mozambique and Peru, claimed that the Bank is undermining its climate commitments by supporting investment incentives for coal, gas and oil projects through its development policy financing (DPF) mechanism. DPF accounts for approximately a third of all Bank funding and provides resources for programmes of policy and institutional reforms that are agreed by the Bank and the borrowing government (see Update 82). The report argued that the Bank’s financing through DPF contradicts the internationally agreed and Bank-supported goal of limiting the global average temperature increase to 2°C, which according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would require that at least two-thirds of existing fossil fuel reserves are left in the ground.

"BIC’s report looked at the Bank’s DPF measures in four countries: Egypt, Indonesia, Mozambique and Peru. It found that DPF introduced subsidies for coal in all countries, apart from Peru. For example, the report argued that Bank-supported subsidies for coal infrastructure have helped Indonesia become one of the world’s top coal exporters. It found some DPF support for renewable energy, but argued that the Bank could do more given that all countries examined have potential to develop renewable energy. For example, while Peru’s DPF provides subsidies to public-private partnerships to develop oil and gas infrastructure, it does not include plans for solar or wind power projects."

https://www.brettonwoodsproject.org/2017/04/world-bank-policy-lending-undermines-climate-goals/

#FCPF #REDD #Ecosystems #ProtectTheForests #EnvironmentalDestruction #ForestDegradation #Deforestation #EnvironmentalImpacts #Egypt #Indonesia #Mozambique #Peru #LeaveItInTheGround #Coal #BigOilAndGas #ExtractiveIndustries #Exploitation #EnvironmentalImpacts
#HumanRights #ParisAgreement
#ParisClimateAgreement #BigOilAndGas #CorporateColonialism #IMFLoanSharks #RenewablesNow

From the Bretton Woods Project: Focus on #MegaProjects

"The [#WorldBank] ’s shift towards leveraging private sector finance for development (see Governance above), which has gained momentum since 2015, includes a particular emphasis on promoting ‘infrastructure as an asset class’, in order to crowd in institutional #investors. This policy initiative is highly dependent on mega-infrastructure projects – and, as noted by a letter sent by concerned economists in October 2018, currently lacks a framework for aligning such mega-projects with the Paris Climate Agreement or the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

"This is of major concern, given that many planned ‘mega-corridors’ in developing regions are predicated on building a new generation of carbon-intensive infrastructure. In many cases, the Bank continues to support such projects that, while not ‘fossil fuel investments’ per se, are part of such carbon-intensive mega-corridors (see Observer Autumn 2018)."

Paper: Infrastructure Megaprojects as World Erasers: Cultural Survival in the Context of the Interoceanic Corridor of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec

Author: Susanne Hofmann, November 8, 2024

"This article explores the meaning of infrastructural changes resulting from the Corredor Interoceánico del Istmo de Tehuantepec (CIIT) infrastructure project for the cultural survival
of Indigenous peoples resident in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region through the lens of ontological justice. The CIIT is being promoted as a multimodal road and rail transport corridor that will link the Gulf of Mexico with the Pacific Ocean, speed up global trade and benefit local residents. Based on interviews with affected residents in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, this research found that there is a strong desire for the continuity of existing, collective life
projects, Indigenous languages, cultural identities, beliefs, spirituality, established political and legal systems, and solidarity economy. De facto, the CIIT infrastructure project functions
as a technology of erasure of other lifeworlds, imposing integration into the One-World World (Escobar, 2016) and assimilation of Indigenous peoples and Afrodescendant communities.
Contemporary legal frameworks are not sufficient to guarantee alterlivability (Hamraie, 2020). Therefore, infrastructural megaprojects based on modern/colonial-extractivist-
developmentalist premises continue to threaten the futurity of Indigenous and
Afrodescendant life projects.

[...]

"An increasing number of infrastructure corridors, such as the Corredor Interoceánico, are currently being built across the globe (e.g. the Belt and Road Initiative/China, Corredor Bioceánico/Paraguay; Corredor Interoceánico/Chile-Bolivia-Brazil; The Northern Transport Corridor in East Africa/Kenya-Ethiopia-South Sudan – just to name a few). These projects are directed at reducing ‘economic distance’ –i.e. speeding up the transport of goods across
geographical distance whilst lowering the cost (Hildyard, 2016: 20). In the process, infrastructure megacorridors restructure whole regions into purpose-specific zones for export, logistics, transit, housing development, resource extraction, manufacturing etc.

"Thereby, they fragment geographic space, generating a distinctive reterritorialisation of the space to develop sites of capitalist growth. Megacorridors connect what Lerner (2010) called 'sacrifice zones' – geographic areas where processes of natural resource extraction cause permanent environmental damage – to global circuits of capital. Across Latin America the social and environmental impacts of extractive megaprojects and resistance against them has
been widely documented (Aguilar Rivero & Echavarría Cango, 2019; Domínguez, 2015, 2017;
Domínguez & Corona, 2016; Ibarra García & Talledos Sánchez, 2016; Pérez Negrete, 2017; Rodríguez Wallenius, 2015). This article explores the meaning of infrastructural changes resulting from the CIIT project for the cultural survival of Indigenous peoples resident in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec region through the lens of ontological justice."

Original paper:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0094582X241294080?journalCode=lapa

PDF version:
https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/120254/1/SHofmann_infrastructure_megaprojects_as_world_erasers_LSE_eprint.pdf

#MegaInfrastructureProjects #CarbonIntensive #MegaCorridors #SDGs #CIIT #GulfOfMexico #SustainableDevelopmentGoals #DeGrowth #IMFLoanSharks #SacrificeZones #CulturalGenocide #CulturalErasism #EnvironmentalDegradation #EnvironmentalDamage #Capitalism #CorporateColonialism #IndigenousPeoples #CulturalSurvival #IsthmusOfTehuantepec #OntologicalJustice #Tehuantepec #ExtractiveIndustries #Oaxaca #Veracruz #CorredorInteroceánico #BeltAndRoadInitiative #CorredorBioceánico #NorthernTransportCorridor #China, #Paraguay; Corredor #Chile #Bolivia #Brazil #EastAfrica #Kenya #Ethiopia #SouthSudan #IndigenousCulture #AfrodescendantCulture