Following the passing of 2 hurricanes, IOTA and ETA, in November through Central America, mainly in Nicaragua and Honduras, the consequences of the catastrophe are devastating. These effects literally keep submerging the most vulnerable social sectors that were left on their own by the governments of the region. The recovery situation is desolating and indicates a worsening of the crisis that increasingly spreads further to wide sectors of the population, not only in terms of infrastructure but also in the social fabric, security, food sovereignty and the conservation of the territories, mainly in the Central American Caribbean.
In this article, we invite you to collectively reflect on the current production/development model in our society. We must question its extractive and depredatory nature, its nuances of colonial domination, ecocide, historical genocide and systematic violations of human rights and nature, protected by the national bourgeois governments. We want to think new kinds of ecologic production that favor the majorities and have an eco-socialist perspective.
By Alternativa Anticapitalista
Where there are mines, only ruins are left
On December 4th, a new tragedy linked to the mining activity struck again. More than 14 “güiriseros” from an artisan mining company in the municipality of San Carlos, Río San Juan, were buried during a collapse that dumped several tons of earth over their bodies, causing the immediate death of those workers. The response of the National System of the Prevention, Mitigation and Attention to Disasters (SINAPRED) was insufficient. After searching for 17 hours and rescuing 2 bodies, the government decided to suspend the excavations, leaving 14 families with the anguish of not finding the bodies of their loved ones.
These kinds of “accidents” are increasingly more frequent in our country as a result of the mining activity. Let’s remember last 3rd of November when 2 güiriseros died in Bonanza, in the north Caribbean of Nicaragua. The same happened in the middle of the year with 3 young miners that were buried alive in the municipality of Villanueva, in the department of Chinandega. They do not seem to be the last examples of this evil.
The mining activity, like in all Latin America, gained a particular relevance for the national governments who granted subsidies to big corporations like the Canadian B2GOLD, or the British CONDOR GOLD, which has projects in El Salvador and concessions in Nicaragua, some of which expire in 2040. These companies, among others, have the support of the Mining Chamber of Nicaragua (Caminic), which is affiliated to the Superior Council of the Private Enterprise (COSEP), and produce in their favor hundreds of millions of dollars each year in exports and sale of gold.
In fact, the Condor Gold is in the process of building the second largest mining plant in the country, to increase the extraction of gold to more than 1.500 daily tons, in the mine La India, in the department of León. With an estimated profit of around 600 million dollars each year, in exchange for the displacement of the families of the area, the pollution of sources of water and soil and the sustained destruction of their ecosystems the company offers the generation of only 1.000 new jobs and small benefits like purified water for the communities of the area (which due to the same extractive activity, are left without access to drinkable water).
These transnationals have not presented plans of mitigation of the socio-environmental impacts, preservation and non-pollution of the groundwater and the subsoil as the government of Ortega-Murillo modified the environmental rules to benefit the mining companies. Said corporations also have the support of the National Army that acts as the state guarantor of these extractive, looting and polluting activities.
Now well, we are still waiting for the official version of the government on the shipwreck followed by a spill of between 10 and 25 quintals of cyanide in the Cocibolca Lake, which was denounced by the Río Foundation on October 8 of this year. This chemical spill is a huge threat and an environmental tragedy inside the largest fresh water reservoir of Nicaragua and the region. It directly affects the population that drinks its water. The compounds of cyanide are important for the extractive industry of metals like gold and it is worth mentioning that in different levels of exposure are harmful to health and can even be deadly.
Since 2016 to 2019, more than 100 mills to extract gold have been documented to use thousands of millions of liters of water each day. They are located mainly in the municipalities of San Carlos, El Castillo, Nueva Guinea, Bluefields, and inside the Biological Reserve of Indio Maíz (the same one that was “accidentally” burned in 2018 for the building of a road to access the center of the protected area).
The mining industry attacks the human right to access quality water for consume by using large quantities in the process of extraction of minerals with the additional mix of chemicals that are highly toxic and polluting for the soil and layers of groundwater, which also cause diseases like cancer and other chronic afflictions. That is why we consider it urgent to legally prohibit this industry, since gold is not useful if we do not have clean water.
Nicaragua is not the barn of Central America
Historically, the agreements for the looting, the super exploitation of ecosystems and the pollution by big industries have been a constant in the agendas of the national governments in order to maintain the macroeconomic numbers and the conditions of profitability, productivity and GDP growth, the benefits of which will never reach the most deprived populations, not even the most affected by the sectors of the extractive model of the region.
This agro-exporting productivist vision is deeply rooted in colonialism and is regulated by the capitalist imperative of the model of global production that practically influences the entire food and consuming system. This voracious system punishes the already weak ecosystems devastated for decades by the advance of the agricultural frontier for agro-genocide, plantations and monoculture like coffee, African oil palm, tobacco, cacao or the sugar cane. In Nicaragua, this model is constitutionally protected and has established a complete consensus of the public-private sectors lead by groups like UPANIC, COSEP, AMCHAM, FUNIDES, with the absolute approval of the FSLN.
These commercial groups have always shown their utter disdain towards the poor population. A recent example of this is the recent indifference of these sectors that were incapable of giving part of their production, with food and articles of first necessity, to the affected families that were devastated by the hurricanes IOTA and ETA.
On the other hand, as the numbers of production of livestock for the export of bovine meat, porcine meat and poultry meat have increased, and with it the levels of profits linked to the national economy and the global market, they are promoting methods that are cruel and unhealthy for the accelerated growth of these species through the use of transgenic food and by injecting the animals large quantities of hormones and antibiotics.
Another important aspect, undoubtedly, is the forced and permanent displacement of the indigenous, afro-Caribbean and impoverished communities of the “productive” territories that keep on resisting the neocolonialism imposed through guns and repression by the mixed colonizers, who are protected by the government and its army that accumulates reports for their participation and complicity with the mobs that smuggle precious woods and on their way destroy entire forests by indiscriminately cutting down centenarian trees and the surrounding vegetation.
These forms of invasion and expropriation of the common goods affect the way of life of these communities, whose ancestral worldview propose a symbiotic living and respectful interaction with nature, which has remained in balance for decades. It goes without saying that this happens because the nation state does not respect the agreements on autonomy of the Caribbean Coast and other communities in Nicaragua. Instead it promotes the same land-owning oligarchies and the old corporate elites that keep profiting off these territories as providers of raw materials for foreign and national companies.
Until now, as a result of global warming and in the midst of an planetary-scale environmental debacle, we are starting to question the sustainability of these voracious production model, which is not based on a social plan to produce to meet the needs of society with methods that acknowledge nature as a subject of rights, respect non-human living beings, the fauna and flora as a whole, and establish guarantees for their conservation.
Another model is possible. The necessary transition
Let’s be clear: the period of pandemics and the model of capitalist production are incompatible with the sustainability of life in the short and middle term, not even in the “long term”. From Anti-capitalist Alternative we have a concrete perspective: If it pollutes, destroys and loots, IT IS NOT PROGRESS!
Then, the transition towards a sustainable model of eco-socialist perspective inevitably means questioning the privileges of the economic minority and its companies in Nicaragua and the transnationals that operate in the region. It means legally banning the polluting, extractive and looting industries like mining, the agribusiness/agro-toxins, the extensive livestock production and industrial fishing, the anarchic cementation/urbanization and even the consumerist advertising.
Who defines what is socially useful? In the face of a system that produces exchange values, in other words, things to sell, we propose the production of use values, in other words, things that are socially necessary. It is a model based on the collective planning by the majority through broad deliberative processes on political, economic, and socio-environmental matters. That is how we strip the capitalist market of the decision over what and how to produce, and thus the decision of what to consume.
It is inevitably about strengthening a plan of state policies on environmental matters and a sustained process of social reeducation. It is about taking over the majority of the main engines of the current economy by a government of the ones who have never ruled, the popular sectors and the youth.
We do not advocate the AYB strategy of running for “elections” with the fake promise of removing the genocides Ortega and Murillo but keep on sustaining the regime of allegiance and consensus with the great economic groups. We raise the proposal of promoting a broad popular referendum to create the conditions that allow us to call for a Free, Sovereign, Democratic and Plurinational Constituent Assembly to grant society as a whole the right to think and decide what model of a country we want and need.
That is why we are building a political platform that is independent from those who are corrupt, repressive and opportunistic. We comprise an alternative to fight for all of our rights with a feminist, anti-capitalist, eco-socialist and internationalist perspective, as part as well of the strategic development of the International Socialist League.
Let’s make the necessary possible. Join us to fight for this!
#AnticapitalistasNic