Nov. 26: New Orleans Workers Group holds a rally in solidarity with workers, peasants, Indigenous people, unions, and women’s organizations against the CIA-engineered coup in Bolivia.
New Orleans Workers Stand With Bolivian People Against Fascist U.S. Coup
The New Orleans Workers Group stands in solidarity with the workers, peasants, Indigenous people, unions and women’s organizations against the CIA-engineered coup in Bolivia carried out on behalf of the ultra rich. This anti-democratic coup is aimed at destroying the immense gains made by the Bolivian people under the leadership of Evo Morales and the Movement for Socialism (MAS). The ultra-rich in Bolivia are deeply racist and want to crush the historic liberation of the Indigenous masses in Bolivia. The rich are horrified that the oppressed, the indigenous people of Bolivia, including Morales, took their fate into their own hands.
These forces of the ultra-rich are destroying schools, burning homes, and attacking women and popular organizations. Their aim is to turn back health, education, and equality gains made in recent years. They seek to return to private profit-making vultures the vast mineral riches of Bolivia such as lithium. They seek to cut the country’s social services in order to get into the good graces of the International Monetary Fund and U.S. banks. It is total nonsense that an uprising against Morales took place on the basis of election fraud. The generals installed a president and cabinet who all hail from the non-indigenous super rich in a majority indigenous country.
This is yet another example of how even the most admirable efforts to build socialism remain vulnerable to reversal if they are confined to electoral politics. History shows us that the only way that the basis for socialism can be won is by arming the workers and peasants and getting rid of the military generals and police of the old state. We know that the Bolivian workers and peasants are up to the task.
U.S. labor unions have denounced this coup and have expressed support for Morales. These include the United Electrical Workers union, the National Nurses United and the AFL-CIO, the main union federation in the U.S. representing 12 million active and retired members.
Nov. 12, La Paz, Bolivia: Confronting a police officer, a woman demonstrates opposition to the racist, anti-Indigenous, CIA-backed coup that forced democratically elected President Evo Morales into exile.
The right-wing, racist coup government has unleashed violent attacks on the Bolivian people. At least 31 people have been killed, mostly pro-Morales protesters. Nevertheless, the workers, indigenous, and progressive people have not backed down. Protesters have continued to fill the streets.
Indigenous women lead protests against coup in Bolivia. Many carry the Wiphala flag (above captionless photo), representing Indigenous nations of the Andes.
On November 19, mostly indigenous protesters amassed and blocked access to a major fuel plant in the town of El Alto. They created roadblocks using tires and other materials. Police and military forces descended on them, killing three and injuring 22.
Defiantly, thousands gathered around the St. Francis of Assisi church the next day to denounce the violence. Aurelio Miranda, 54, told the press, “The world must know the truth. What happened was a massacre…They used weapons like you use in war.”
All those fighting for a more just world, for indigenous and women’s rights need to show our continued solidarity in this fight. All power to the Bolivian workers and peasants!
Sign reads: “Fire the self-proclaimed President Jeanine Anez.”
Women in Brazil defend against the invasion of Indigenous territories.
By Nathalie Clarke
Amazonia is the world’s largest tropical rainforest. This 56 million-year-old expanse of forest is home to countless species of life—many of which are still undiscovered. Indigenous Nations have inhabited the land for over 11,000 years and have helped shape the forest as we know it. Capitalist media often depict the Amazon rainforest as a vast, unpopulated expanse of land ripe for the taking. This narrative gives capitalists cover for the rampant deforestation that they’re carrying out to convert the Amazon into farmland, erasing the lives and struggles of its Indigenous People.
Although agribusiness tycoons have been burning the forest for decades, the recent fires in the Amazon dwarf past ones. Since the election of fascist President Jair Bolsonaro, environmental laws have been loosened allowing the big bosses in the mining and farming industries to do what they will. So far in 2019, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reports an 80 percent increase compared to 2018.
“The [fires are] a direct result of each of Bolsonaro’s incentives to deforestation and his actions to make the environmental code more flexible, allowing the rural capitalists who, incited by the president, make the Amazon burn in flames, increasing their massive estates throughout the region. […] The trail of fire visible from space is a result of the expansion of agribusiness, leaving a trail of the indigenous peoples’ blood, as well as decimating the native fauna and flora” said the Brazilian group Movement of Revolutionary Workers.
These fires occurred just after the Waorani people of Pastaza won a landmark victory: half a million acres of their ancestral lands were to be protected from oil drilling. TWO WEEKS LATER we see a drastic increase in fires set to the Amazon by greedy agri-capitalists, backed by their fascist right-wing government. This is no coincidence; it’s colonization and genocide.
The fascist Bolsonaro told reporters in 1998: “It’s a shame that the Brazilian cavalry hasn’t been as efficient as the Americans, who exterminated the Indians.”
In Brazil, in Honduras, in Louisiana, and around the world, Indigenous people have led the fight to save the planet—risking their safety and lives. A recent Global Witness report found that 3 environmental activists are killed every week; with Brazil listed as number four on the list of most dangerous places for them. On July 23rd, an Indigenous leader and organizer, Emyra Wajãpi, was found dead in northeastern Brazil. Two men who were members of Brazil’s landless activist group MST were killed in December 2018 in a rural area in the northeast state of Paraíba. The names and stories of Indigenous leaders who have put their lives on the line are innumerable.
But environmental activists don’t just face challenges from logging and mining companies. The capitalist State itself—the police, the government, the law—often criminalizes them because they know that chaining oneself to a pipeline or blocking the path of loggers stops the flow of capital like no protest alone can.
In 2017, 84 members of U.S. Congress suggested that the Department of Justice should be able to prosecute pipeline saboteurs as domestic terrorists according to definitions in the federal criminal code. Bolsonaro’s racist, violent remarks and the criminalization of environmental activists represent a global trend.
We, the global working-class, must understand our role in saving the planet. We, the derrick hands on oil rigs, the foot soldiers in endless imperialist wars, the servers that watch our bosses waste food every single day, the auto-workers and welders, truck drivers and cooks, must see through the lies these fat cat politicians would have us believe. Our neighborhoods and regions are already polluted with toxic chemicals. Our houses get built on toxic soil. Our food sources get depleted. We are demonized for eating meat or for driving a pick-up while the wealthy are allowed to jet off to Europe every other week.
We are condemned for working in oil and gas even though those are the only jobs available in our communities. How have we gotten even the smallest sliver of the pie?
The Guarani people of central-western Brazil said, “We invite everybody to fight alongside indigenous peoples against the genocidal attack which is currently underway, and which has been reactivated by the current government.” Our only answer to the current environmental crisis is ourselves: whether farmers, pharmacists, or food service workers, we are fighters, survivors, hard-workers, and we are infinitely powerful when united.
Chairman Tehassi Hill of the Oneida Nation, outside the Federal Courthouse in New Orleans.
By Sasha Irby
On March 14 a delegation of leaders from a coalition of 325 tribal Nations came to New Orleans’ Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to defend the Indian Child Welfare Act against a legal challenge from the Goldwater Institute, a right-wing legal organization that works for ultra rich capitalists like the Koch brothers and the DeVos family. The Goldwater Institute supports lowering workers’ wages, privatizing schools, denying workers healthcare, and opposing any regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. Now they have the audacity to claim to be champion of civil rights. They allege that ICWA is a form of ‘race’ based discrimination because the federal law privileges the rights of Native people to adopt their own children over the adoption rights of non-Native families. This “civil rights” challenge is a cynical smoke-screen: by attempting to reduce the people of the many Indigenous Nations to a mere race, they aim to diminish Native people’s sovereign claims to their own children, their own governments, and their own land. The capitalists who are heading up the challenge to ICWA are eager to get their hands on the land and resources currently under the political control of Indigenous Nations.
The idea that right-wing advocacy groups are fighting against ICWA because they feel that it is ethically unjust is an insult to those who know the painful history that necessitated the law’s creation. IWCA was passed in 1978 to help stop the widespread kidnapping of Native children from their families by state and federal agencies. These children were then “adopted” into non-Indigenous households. For over a century the United States government operated according to the genocidal philosophy of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Governmental policies sought to assimilate Native children into white society by removing them from their families, elders, and communities and placing them with white families or forcibly sending them to boarding schools to be stripped of their language, culture, spiritual practices, and identity. Even after the boarding school era, Native children were torn from their families at an alarming rate. Before the passing of ICWA, up to 1 in 3 Indigenous children were adopted into non-Native households.
ICWA is vital for the future of Indigenous Nations, and attempting to dismantle the law is a direct attack on the sovereignty of our peoples. Children remaining in families of their own tribal membership allow them access to their culture, their lifeways, and – key for maintaining tribal sovereignty – their tribal citizenship. The destruction of Indigenous sovereignty has always been the goal of imperial project of the colonizers. By leaving our children vulnerable to forced removal from their Nations, you strip that child of access to their identity and their part in their Nation’s future. By stealing the children, you drain the lifeblood of our Nations. Our tribal cohesion crumbles and eventually our numbers dwindle and we die out. Without our children, our future is written in sand.
Charles Koch, a right-wing oil baron who hates workers, is the seventh wealthiest person on the planet. When once accused of stealing crude oil from members of the Osage nation of the Great Plains, Koch responded, “I want my fair share and that’s all of it.” Koch runs a bag man operation called ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) which gives money to politicians in exchange for legislation that benefits them. Most of the Baton Rouge legislators are recipients of these bribes.
Koch paid Louisiana politicians to oppose a raise in the unlivable $7.25 an hour minimum wage. Why? Like he said, the rich want all the money for themselves.
No one should be fooled into thinking that the super-rich have “earned” their wealth through superhuman powers.
Every penny they hoard comes from the labor of the workers. The ultra-rich are a band of crooks, thieves and murderers, using inherited money to starve people for their profits.
We should be perfectly clear: they are stealing from us. Yet when we get anything—even a modest wage increase—they claim that we are stealing from them. Enough is never enough for them.
The head of the World Bank, representing the U.S. bankers mainly, has said that wages must be driven down even further. We workers don’t have the purchasing power we had 50 years ago. Younger generations of workers struggle with widespread job insecurity and a lack of benefits, accessible housing and affordable education. The rich want to impoverish all workers—technical, manual, and service workers alike.
The filthy rich feel entitled to every luxury. The lives of our children mean nothing to them.
The increasing concentration of wealth in fewer and fewer hands shows that the capitalist system is an utter failure.
It’s our labor that runs the world. We vastly outnumber them. Ask yourself this question: Can New Orleans run without sanitation workers? No. Can it run without real estate developers? Yes! We can do without them; they cannot profit without us.
Wealth should belong collectively to the working class and our families. We are entitled to a good life. But we must free our minds and organize to get it!
“Let us wake up, humankind! We’re out of time. We must shake our conscience free of the rapacious capitalism, racism and patriarchy that will only assure our own self-destruction.”
March 2 marks the 3-year anniversary of the assassination of internationally renowned environmental leader and hero of the Lenca nation, Berta Cáceres. Cáceres was an Indigenous defender of the land and water who was murdered by the Honduran government and paramilitaries. She led protests against the construction of a dam which threatened the livelihood of her people and spoke out against the right-wing dictatorship installed the United States. Since the 2009 US-backed coup in Honduras, the regime has carried out the murder and repression of Indigenous land defenders, social leaders, and members of the LGBTQ community.
Berta’s example has inspired people all over the world take up the struggle for justice and liberation in Honduras. Her daughter has taken up the struggle; in 2017, she was elected General Secretary of COPINH, the indigenous Lenca organization co-founded and led by Berta Cáceres.
On Jan. 18, thousands of people from hundreds of Indigenous nations across the country and the world convened on Pawmunkey and Piscataway land (so-called “Washington, DC”) to stand united against the continuing injustices endured by the Indigenous peoples of North, Central and South America, Oceania, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.
The march demanded immediate action on a host of issues, including the following:
Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW), of which there are over 7,000 confirmed since 2016 with many cases going unreported.
Environmental racism, evident in the oil, mining, and petrochemical companies that operate illegally on Indigenous land, often in violation of treaty terms between Indigenous nations and the United States.
Violence against Indigenous children, as demonstrated by the cruel kidnapping and caging of Indigenous children by ICE or by the right wing attacks on the Indian Welfare Act which protects Indigenous children from being stolen from their families by adoption agencies.
Voter suppression targeting people living on reservations.
The march began with prayer and song at 8AM outside of the Department of the Interior Building, now home of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (originally a division of US Department of War). Participants marched, drummed, and sang as they made their way through the National Mall to the Lincoln Memorial. Of the many issues facing Indian Country brought up in the march, there seemed to be a common thread – the exploitation of Indigenous peoples by the capitalist ruling class and the continuing genocide, by intended action or neglectful disregard, of Indigenous peoples by that same ruling class.
L’eau Est La Vie camp is being built to protect the water, wetlands and ways of life across the coast of Louisiana from the Bayou Bridge Pipeline (BBP), proposed by Energy Transfer Partners (ETP). On December 14 2017, ETP was granted a permit from the New Orleans District Office of the Army Corps of Engineers giving it the go ahead to lay this pipeline from Nederland, Texas to St. James Parish west of New Orleans.
There has been a long pushback from many different groups, and with the granting of this permit, L’eau Est La Vie is preparing to resist the construction on the front-lines. Cherri Foyltin, one of the many upstanding indigenous women leading the fight against BBP, with blessing from the Atakapa-Ishak Nation, recently bought a large plot of land on the route of the proposed pipeline. The land will be used as a sanctuary for incoming water protectors.
As tension between ETP and local environmental activists rise, this space provides hope that this resistance will not be in vein. Though pipeline construction has not begun yet, it is only a matter of time before water protectors will be standing in protest in front of large metal machines and police barricades. This fight is not futile, as local media would like you to believe, but more people must be willing to speak up.
This pipeline affects the livelihood of everyone in southern Louisiana; receding wetlands make hurricanes unstoppable; oil spills make waterways undrinkable and toxic to our seafood; crude chemicals spread cancer and disease to our neighbors, and the list goes on. If you feel for this fight, L’eau La Vie Camp is accepting donations and asking for volunteers. Find out more at nobbp.org.
Stand in solidarity with marginalized communities across southern Louisiana being affected by environmental racism and make our government officials hear us when we say “NO OIL IN MY BOIL! KEEP IT IN THE SOIL!”
Strength and resilience is exhibited throughout Houma history.
The Houma people were first “discovered” by white settlers living in the area we now call Baton Rouge. Thanks to the Indian Removal Act, signed into law by Andrew Jackson in 1830, Houma people were forced out of their homelands and into diaspora. Many were pushed to the west on the Trail of Tears. Houma people who were caught escaping the removal were sent as slaves to Cuba. The remaining Houma people settled on the Louisiana Gulf Coast and began to build their communities back up. Some Africans who escaped their slaveholders found refuge with Houma people.
Houma children did not have access to education until the late 1940’s because under Jim Crowe law, they could not go to school with either Black or white children. Schools only went to 7th grade, and there were no certified instructors. Subsequently, native children had to let go of any cultural identity they had. Having long hair, wearing anything related to one’s tribe, and practicing tribal spirituality were all prohibited. “Kill the Indian, save the man” was the government’s genocidal mentality.
Louisiana’s booming oil industry hit Houma people hard. Rich settlers profited off of the resources that this land offers. However, Houma people couldn’t get any of those jobs because most of them didn’t speak English. Houma people mostly spoke French with small bits of their native language.
Right now, Houma people still face a plethora of issues. The effects of Katrina can still be seen in many native communities. Environmental racism penetrates the lives of Houma people. The erosion of wetlands caused by climate change threatens their communities, and clean drinking water is scarce for many native households. The proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline will further coastal and wetlands erosion and directly affect native people along the coast.
The federal government refuses to recognize United Houma Nation as a sovereign people. This allows the oil companies to extract oil from Houma land without compensation further impoverishing the Nation.
This is only a summary of Houma history. There is hope for the future because we, as Houma people, will continue to protect and defend our homelands. If we don’t, then who will?
