The VII Pan-amazon Social Forum (FSPA, Brazilian acronym) was held from May 28th to 31st, 2014, in the city of Macapá (Brazil). Following the motto “No Meio do Mundo os Povos se Encontram” (In the middle of the world, Peoples meet), representatives of more than fifty amazon based organizations coming from all states in Brazil which are part of this region as well as representatives from every country in the pan-amazon met in the city of Macapá. This city, in the eastern amazon in Brazil, lies right at the borders with French Guyana and Surinam, and is cut across by the Equator line. While drawing the public attention to this imaginary line, the Forum participants and organizers were also stressing that at this place, in between the North and South hemispheres, Pan Amazonian peoples were meeting to discuss the centrality of this region to their lives. They considered this dialogue as a fundamental step in thinking of another possible world for them and to future Pan Amazonian generations departing from a regional perspective.
Amongst the FSPA participants, there were environmental justice related social movements, with strong participation of women, indigenous women and quilombolas (slave-descendent peoples). Coalitions of people impacted by major infrastructure projects and mega economic enterprises in the Pan Amazonian region also participated in the event, highlighting their struggle against the systematic human rights violations caused by these operations. Such coalitions and other participants brought to the debate the issue of increasing criminalization of the social movements that are dedicated to the defense of the Pan Amazonian peoples’ rights. Another point raised within the debate about activism in the region was the constant attempts of marginalizing local social struggles through biased corporate media that frequently reports the advances of big infrastructure projects in the Amazon positively. These vindications and calls for action to other fundamental struggles in the Pan Amazonian context can be found in the Carta de Macapá (Macapá Charter) (http://foropanamazonico.wordpress.com/2014/05/31/carta-de-macapa-os-povos-livres-da-panamazonia-vencerao/), agreed by the movements upon the VII FSFA closure event on May 31st. The document endorses the axis of resistance part of the FSPA principles since its first edition in Belém, capital of the state of Pará, in Brazil. Some of these principles are the struggle against top down development projects and the corroboration of a project committed to living well (viver bem or bien vivir) stemming from the multiple Pan Amazonian identities.
In light of these principles, the Transnational Institute (TNI) and Rede Brasil sobre Instituições Financeiras Multilaterais (Brazilian Network) co-organized the roundtable “Transnational Capital and Socio-environmental Conflicts in the Pan Amazonian Region”, under the framework of the Global Campaign “Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity”. The roundtable had the objective of evaluating the state of corporate power in the region, which usually unfolds as part of development infrastructure projects and state sponsored economic programmes to accelerate economic growth based on the intensive exploitation of natural resources. The roundtable debate highlighted the perennial presence of an oligopoly of transnational corporations in the several projects that have and are been developed in the region. These companies often and overtly violate the human and territorial rights of the peoples and populations and constantly provoke socio-environmental conflicts that jeopardize their ways of living.
Special attention was devoted to the role some transnational corporations have in constantly disrespecting human rights and the rights of nature. Most of these transnational corporations operate in: 1) the construction business (usually as contractors), such as Brazil headquartered Odebretch, Camargo Corrêa and Andrade Gutierrez; 2) in the mining sector, as it is the case of Vale; 3) in the oil industry, such as the case of US based Chevron; 4) in the energy sector (generation and distribution); and, last but not least, 5) they are part of the transnational agribusiness, such as Cargill.
Participants in the roundtable recalled that these corporations depict a highly concentrated stage of capital, which is also highly specialized in different areas of operation even when managed by the same economic group. In fact, this is the case of construction consortiums controlling infrastructure projects in the Pan Amazonian region. Oftentimes, these companies will also be in charge of delivering services that are, at the same time, the objective and by-product of the same infrastructure projects. The classic example of this model lies in the operation of companies as practiced in the construction of hydro-plants and dams in the Brazilian and Peruvian Amazon. When analyzing these processes, the participants stressed State’s complicity with corporate power by legitimizing and shaping the architecture of impunity that place corporate profits over the rights and well-being of people. Impunity is designed in the region either through special concession regimes at odds with ordinary national juridical norms or by dismantling mechanisms that guarantee the protection of territorial and human rights of people impacted by the same kind of projects. Those rights are forsaken in the name of fast-tracking decision-making needed to guarantee that these projects, which are argued to be beneficial and essential to the Amazon community development and integration, can be undertaken with less bureaucracy. However, such scheme only benefits the transnational capital encroachment in the Pan Amazonian region.
As part of the architecture of Transnational Corporations impunity, it was stressed that the pan amazon states are not coming to terms – or they are inadequately implementing – procedures and principles agreed by them upon the mandate of international conventions such as those related to the Free Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) as laid down in the ILO 169 Convention on the Rights of Tribal Peoples, 1989. In addition, it was highlighted that there are cases in which the national environmental law is not respected – neither by sub-national governments, nor by TNCs.
The roundtable also discussed situations in which for the purpose of having success in negotiating Free Trade Agreements or Bilateral Investment Trade Agreements, governments in the region are compromising environmental legislations creating conditions that lead to the increase in socio-environmental conflicts. In the Pan Amazonian region, another key feature in the architecture of impunity lies in the process of financing development projects and programmes as carried by the Brazilian National Economic and Social Development Bank (BNDES), which sponsors a great many of the projects in the whole region. Throughout the process to approve financial aid, often the BNDES gives the front-loading to the projects when they are still in the stage of gathering data for the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA). Usually, the same consortium that conducts the research is the one that will get the aid for building the infrastructure. With that, the EIA, that must be conditional to the second stage (the infrastructure construction per se), ends up being financed with public money and carried on at the same time of the process that it should be conditional just to begin with. This scheme ends up revealing the complicity of public banks with the environmental crimes and human rights violations in the region, including the intergenerational violations. The latter are not accounted for when thinking about conditionalities to developmental projects.
In this sense, the speech of Luis Yanza of the Unión de Afectados por Chevron-Texaco (UDAPT), who talked about the historical resistance of the thirty thousand people impacted by the Chevron-Texaco enormous oil spills in the Amazon Ecuadorian provinces of Sucumbíos and Orellana, confirmed that kind of socio-environmental devastation. Nevertheless, his speech gave hope to resistance movements from other Pan Amazonian countries. Yanza told the audience that the Ecuadorian Supreme Court decided for compensation to the victims of the environmental disaster when it declared the Chevron-Texaco guilty of the oil spill. It is important to note that this decision was taken in the face of Chevron’s denial to comply with the reparation previously demanded by the affected communities.
Yanza’s testimonial led Brazilian representatives of social movements attending the roundtable to commit to support a campaign in Brazil to pressure the Supreme Justice Court (STJ, Brazilian acronym) to homologate the Ecuadorian Supreme Court decision. The request for homologation in Brazil is based on the fact that Chevron still has financial assets in this country that could be sequestered by judicial demand posed to the STJ. If the decision is favorable to the impacted people, the assets could be used to ensure the reparation as charged by the Ecuadorian Supreme Court. As this narrative was told from the point of view of the resistance and of those involved with the articulation against Chevron, Yanza’s speech deeply moved representatives of the Amazon Rivers Articulation (Articulação dos Rios Amazônicos), created during the VI FSPA, in the city of Cobija, Bolivia. This movement that emerged as resistance against hydro-plants and dams projects in the Madeira River (south western Amazon) has gotten inspired by Yanza’s story to initiate a similar judicial demand related to the cases of Jirau and Santo Antonio hydro-plants, which are provoking transnational environmental impacts in Bolivia and Brazil. Currently, social movements and specialists in both countries are discussing the structural role played by the two hydro-plants in construction in the Brazilian side, in the impacts of the record breaking Madeira river floods, between January and April, 2014. The floods left thousands of people homeless in the city of Porto Velho, Rondônia, Brazil, and more than a million people in the same situation, in the Beni department, at the Madeira River upstream, in Bolivia.
