The Global Minga for Mother Earth and the Rights of Her Peoples begins

Under the motto “Save the planet,” indigenous movements throughout the world have called for a “Global Minga for Mother Earth,” which will take place October 12-16, 2009. Its purpose is a large-scale peaceful mobilization toward the headquarters of the United Nations (UN), where organizers will deliver the proposal of the indigenous peoples to put an end to global warming. Also, during its stop in Bolivia, it will inaugurate the first Climate Justice Tribunal.

“The contamination generated by big industries has altered the natural order of our planet,” explains Miguel Palacín Quispe, General Coordinator of the Andean Coordinating Committee for Indigenous Organizations (CAOI). “Global warming is threatening the biodiversity of Mother Earth, and each minute, in different parts of the world, disastrous events occur, provoked by droughts, floods, landslides and melting ice.”

Faced with this situation, organizations of indigenous and social movements have decided to plan this march, whose principle objective is “to fight for the survival of life, for peace with the Earth”; to plan consciousness-raising cultural activities; and to denounce the commodification of life (food, natural resources), contamination of water, plundering of minerals, use of hydrocarbons, and deforestation for the purpose of extensive cattle breeding, agro-fuels or the use of transgenics.

Palacín Quispe affirmed that they wish to show that it is possible to confront that change “from the perspective of the proposals and the practices of the people, in harmony and reciprocity with Mother Nature: with living well, with ethnically diverse states, and with a model of integration based on fairness, reciprocity, and complementarity”: traits characteristic of the indigenous peoples of Latin America that they want to introduce to the Convention on Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR).

“Today we offer our values, our experiences, and our knowledge in order to save the planet. Without inflicting capitalism, destruction or contamination,” assure the organizers of the “Minga” (a Kichwa word that means collective work or action with solidarity). Among their proposals, they emphasize the defense of alimentary sovereignty and the support of native crops, domestic consumption and local economies as opposed to the transnational model of extraction on a grand scale.

Palacín Quispe also announced that, within the framework of the Global Minga, they will organize the first Climate Justice Tribunal on October 13 and 14, in Cochabamba, Bolivia, which will allow for the identification and ethical condemnation of those transnational companies and complicit states “that plunder natural resources and infringe on the rights of the people and of Mother Nature.”

This Tribunal was thought of as a step toward the formation of an International Tribunal of Environmental Justice, in the style of the Hague Tribunal. The objective is to make visible the cause-and-effect relationship between the model of extractive and corporate development of the transnationals and climate change. “And it will ethically judge those responsible for ecological debt, provoked by the consumerism that converts biodiversity into raw materials,” they add.

The “ecological debt” refers to the fact that although 85% of the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming are generated in the world’s richest countries and only 6% are generated in Latin America (as was explained in a recent report from the World Bank), it is in the poorest (and non-industrialized) nations where they produce the most damaging effects, like floods or droughts in fertile land.

In this sense, the Minga will host coordination meetings for strategies for the Alternative Summit to the Kyoto Protocol Conference, which will take place in Copenhagen, Denmark, in December of this year. With less than two months until this new environmental summit, world powers still have yet to reach an agreement on a plan to substitute the Kyoto Protocol. And, according to the Meteorological Office of the United Kingdom, if it is not done by 2012, the most apocalyptic scenarios will be unavoidable.

“We know that other worlds are not only critical: they are, above all else, possible,” assure the forces behind the Global Minga. “And now we are building them.”

(translation: T.M. Orzolek)