Victor M. Quintana S.
L
he extractivist companies are champions in the management of double standards: all the wide sleeves to dispossess, prey, extract minerals, water, wood; all the rigor and weight of legalism against the communities and people who defend their territories, their waters, their forests, their grasslands. Foreign mining companies, national agricultural companies, with the arms of the law or those of illegality; weak or complicit governments, it doesn’t matter.
Two communities in the northern desert of Chihuahua, the ejidos Benito Juárez and Constitución, in the municipalities of Buenaventura and Ahumada, are now harassed by notifications, production orders and threats of arrest warrants, the entire arsenal of the lawfare against the leaders who have led the resistance to the Mag Silver mining company and the El Paraíso ranch of the LeBarón family.
Since 2012, the Benito Juárez ejido – we have already narrated it in these pages – has opposed the looting by the mining company El Cascabel, a subsidiary of the Canadian Mag Silver, which invaded, corrupted, illegally bought and drilled through the law and the assembly decision. lands in common use for mining exploration purposes. The dignified resistance of women and men never wavered, not even when on October 22, 2012, two of its leaders, Ismael Solorio and his wife, Manuelita Solís, were assassinated by hitmen near Ciudad Cuauhtémoc. The following month, the ejido assembly decided by an overwhelming majority to expel the illegally established miner in its territory. Negotiations were made with the state government and the company so that it would remove several thousand tons of samples that it had in a lot. He only removed half, but in March 2013, the ejidatarios organized an epic task and in one day they removed 2,000 tons of already analyzed, unusable samples from the limits of the ejido.
The company has not stopped pressing all those years. He denounced 10 people from the ejido for damages before the state prosecutor’s office. In 2015, another defender of the territory and the Carmen river basin, Alberto Almeida, was assassinated in Juárez. Faced with the threats, several of the ejido leaders filed a lawsuit with the IACHR and the latter ordered precautionary measures to be provided to nine people from the ejido. Mag Silver does not give up, has even used the Canadian embassy to pressure the government and asks for a damage repair
which amounts to 43 million dollars! by useless earth and stones.
The ejido Constitución is a neighbor of Benito Juárez and mutual struggle and resistance spread. In 2017, the family of Joel LeBarón, after having acquired the La Mohina property, began to clear 297 hectares without a land use change license from Semarnat to plant walnut trees and drilled nine wells, also illegally, while the flow from another well that was authorized, managed to have it irregularly transferred to start operating.
As soon as the Constitución ejido felt that the operation of the wells at the new El Paraíso ranch was destroying the old irrigation wells and even the community’s drinking water well, they launched into protest. They had to knock down the fences to enter the ranch and check how many wells were operating and how many were connected to CFE lines.
Despite all the illegalities committed, the LeBarons, using their undeniable status as victims in other matters, called the state police, sought the protection of the National Guard and ended up also denouncing a group of ejidatarios from the two communities for intentional damage
. To ensure even more freedom in their predatory activism, the LeBarons have just sued the authorities to constitute themselves as a tribal community with collective rights to free self-determination, autonomy and self-government. The next step will surely be to annex Utah, Arizona or Texas.
While the material and intellectual murderers of Ismael, Manuelita and Alberto Almeida are still out there, traceable, but unpunished; and the environmental authorities and Conagua have not proceeded due to the irregularities in land use and extraction committed by the LeBarón, nor has the CFE categorically denied making connections to the irregular wells, the state prosecutor’s office reactivates the files, one of them, inactive since 2013, and requests an arrest warrant against 18 people from the two ejidos.
Last week the police went to notify the denounced activists of the Benito Juárez ejido, but the rotating guards of the town prevented them from doing so. And so they will continue.
It happens in Chihuahua as it does throughout the country, the extractivist companies press, while the various levels of government allow themselves to be trapped by legal demands, by diplomatic pressure, by bites that are neither legal nor diplomatic. And when all that fails, there is always the use of criminals for hire. Lawfare or outlawfareor both: this is the war of extractivism.
