El Informante
There is movement in Belém. On one side, the official summit, inaugurated yesterday (10N, ed.), where for two weeks country delegations will discuss whether it is possible to advance in terms of mitigation, financing, and mechanisms for a just transition. On the other, a variety of forums and meeting spaces where organizations and social groups from around the world, especially from Latin America, are trying these days to revitalize internationalist alliances to counter the global extractivist offensive.
From the outset, in fact, not much can be expected. For far too long, COPs have become a ritual in which the world’s main leaders parade — on this occasion, not even those from the highest-emitting countries China, the United States, India, and Russia — to issue solemn statements of intent and promote new mechanisms that, once the summits end, fail to translate effectively into timelines and budgets. “We do not want this to be a market of ideological products; we want something serious, with decisions that are implemented,” stated the president of Brazil, acknowledging the inefficiencies of some of the dynamics that oscillate between greenwashing and business as usual.
In the latter space, however, renewed hopes can be found. In parallel to COP 30 — or one could even say in contrast to the official summit — a multitude of Indigenous, environmental, labor, feminist, and anti-capitalist organizations and movements gathered in Belém to rethink strategies and reactivate international bodies to strengthen processes of struggle and resistance. Drawing on the experience of the World Social Forum and efforts to overcome the contradictions of progressive governments, the aim is to promote processes of community self-organization that renew the social fabric and look beyond the constant demands placed on the State.
People’s summits
People’s summits have been held for thirty years alongside the climate summits promoted by the United Nations. This year, after three COP editions held in countries characterized by the criminalization of the right to protest and the persecution of activists and organizations critical of governments, social groups have renewed their interest in this forum. At the People’s Summit in Belém, representatives from more than 1,200 organizations from around the world will gather around a shared goal “to strengthen popular mobilization and converge on unified agendas socio-ecological, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial, based on human rights, and a manifesto”.
The national summit will begin tomorrow, November 12, with a river march of more than 200 boats carrying around 5,000 people. Through this nautical caravan, the movements participating in this alternative summit “joined forces to make their condemnation echo through the waters against the decisions of the ZP that perpetuate this model of territorial exploitation”. As one of the initiative’s spokespersons stated, “the waters of the Amazon carry voices that the world needs to hear those that defend life, territories, and the climate”.
Dozens of talks, workshops, and assemblies taking place over four days within the People’s Summit will culminate on Saturday, November 15, with large demonstrations, followed by decentralized actions in many other countries. On Sunday the 16th, the demands of the National Summit will be presented in the plenary of the Community of Practice.
At this event, the largest gathering of activists and social organizations around COP 30, one of the issues certain to be debated is the relationship between the movement and progressive governments. Just three weeks ago, the state-owned company Petrobras received authorization from the Lula government to explore oil in deep waters about 500 kilometers from the mouth of the Amazon River. In a city decorated for the occasion with thousands of colorful advertising posters emphasizing the importance of caring for the Amazon, the distance between the usual rhetoric of green capitalism and the repeatedly postponed urgency of transforming the primary export matrix will once again become evident.
Yet this is by no means the only space taking place in Belém outside initiatives sponsored by the Brazilian government. From November 8 to 11, the Second Ecosocialist Meeting of Latin America and the Caribbean brought together two hundred activists from different countries to reflect, based on experiences of struggle against territorial plunder, on strategies to strengthen a common internationalist front capable of confronting the socio-ecological crisis. Likewise, from November 7 to 12, the Fourth International Meeting of People Affected by Dams took place, the result of a three-decade-long process of international coordination of community struggles against large dams and hydroelectric plants.
Peoples against extractivism
On a planet immersed in climate emergencies and extreme inequality created by the Capitalocene — and by policies that paint capitalism green — diverse voices of resistance to the extractivist model have come together in a coalition Peoples Against Extractivism. This space was founded in Belém on November 9 to unite and articulate movements, communities, and organizations that confront dispossession and commit to a profound transformation of a system that threatens lives and territories.
This international network brings together experiences mainly from Latin America and Europe, with a determination to expand its presence on the African continent. The coalition includes local movements, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and peasant communities, as well as diverse mass social organizations. All fight, from different fronts, against the same enemy the extractivist model that sustains the continuous overexploitation of common goods and the expansion of production frontiers into territories deemed “unproductive”. It is not limited to mining or oil. It also includes monocultures, agribusiness, biofuels, and mega energy projects that consolidate dependent models and generate the reprimarization of peripheral economies.
For this network, extractivism is not only an economic practice but also a form of power organization within liberal democracies and a mechanism of domination that conditions community life. In this new phase of capitalist accumulation, dispossession — cynically transformed into sacrifice zones — is imposed on people and territories, now justified in the name of the energy transition. Within this militarized green capitalism, the European Union, the United States, and China compete for control of the minerals needed to sustain the economic metabolism of the capitalist core. In this accelerated race to secure access to critical raw materials, which represents no real progress toward an ecosocial transition, mining has become the most violent expression of extractivism, marked by militarization, forced displacement, racism, criminalization, and even the murder of those who defend the commons.
The Alliance of Nations Against Extractivism argues that protecting habitats and ecosystems is inseparable from the struggle against the neocolonial extractivist offensive. This internationalism is first woven through denunciation and solidarity with the peoples of Ecuador, Panama, and Peru, where state repression has intensified in recent months through arbitrary detentions, militarization of communities, and the prosecution of environmental and social leaders. At the same time, in the face of expanding extractive frontiers, it is grounded in building alternatives from below.
Territorial resistance is organized in defense of water, land, territories, and those who inhabit them, articulating different struggles and demands. In Ecuador, Amazonian communities halted oil projects. In Panama, a popular movement succeeded in stopping a mining concession after weeks of mobilization. In Peru, peasant patrols keep collective defense of the commons alive. These processes reposition the right to resistance as a common practice against extractivist neocolonialism.
The planet and communities can no longer wait for the goodwill of governments that promote extractive fever. In the face of territorial dispossession, militarization, and corporate impunity, this internationalist network seeks to strengthen the defense of territory as a living body, because territory is not a resource it is the material basis of community life and of the nature that inhabits it, and for Indigenous peoples, the spiritual foundation of life. It also upholds the right to resistance, self-defense, and self-determination of peoples as pillars of ecological and social justice. And it commits to building community-based alternatives such as solidarity economies, self-governance, feminist and agroecological networks, and many other practices driven by local organizations.
Strengthening transnational counter-hegemonic networks is key to confronting corporate power and advancing toward the horizon of a dignified life and climate justice. As Peoples Against Extractivism reiterates in its arguments, our territories are not negotiable they are defended.
Pedro Ramiro
Latin American Observatory of Multinational Companies (OMAL)
Maureen Zelaya Paredes
Environmentalists in Action
Reproduced from the El Informante website. Check out the original HERE.