The Peoples that make up the M4 in resistance to the Capitalist and Extractive Model, towards social transformation
DECLARE
In Guatemala City’s historic center, on November 15, 16, and 17, we met to discuss and analyze the current processes to regulate the consultation of our peoples and to build collective strategies that unite our principles in the defense of our common and natural resources and to denounce, once more, the manipulation by large corporations and the role played by the States.
We reaffirm our resistance to the corrupt capitalist and extractivist model, which in its desire for the accumulation of wealth, commodifies life, our territories, rivers, and all the elements of Mother Earth, sowing fear as a mechanism of social control and division through the militarization of our territories.
Regulated consultations, when carried out by governments and large corporations, are a farce. We call this type of consultation ‘manipulated consultation,’ because it has been used to legalize and legitimize the intervention in our territories by the state, international financial institutions, and human rights organizations, who distort the spirit of good faith implicit in the fundamental and collective rights of the peoples, referenced in the International Labour Organization’s Convention 169 and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
The oligarchy, transnational corporations, their allied governments and international financial organizations attempt to justify the violence, dispossession, and destruction of the environment and all forms of life by spreading terror through assassinations and the criminalization of environmental and human rights defenders, who are subject to psychological torture through stigmatization [through] the intervention of corporations and their megaprojects, such as monocultures, mining, hydroelectric dams, wind farms, geothermal projects, gas pipelines, hydraulic fracturing and biosphere reserves in our territories. All of this serves to justify the false discourse of development, to “get us out of poverty” – a discourse that, to this point, has not been real. Instead, with their intervention in our territories, comes a violent dispossession and destruction of our territories. At this conference, we lift up our spirituality towards the defense of our territories and the historic and cultural unity of our peoples.
History is made by the men and women who live in unequal conditions and who fight for the defense of territory and the culture of the peoples. We call on everyone to recognize the importance of incorporating men and women into the struggle in equal conditions.
We declare ourselves in the defense of children and youth in the processes of the liberation of our peoples and we condemn all forms of criminalization of protest. And to this end, this space is open for youth to participate in processes of organizing and education.
We call on all peoples and organizations to build a common front at this crossroads, resuming our own processes of self-determination and building a harmonious life, the buen vivir, of our peoples.
We urge communities to not continue in the game played by transnational extractivist companies.
Capitalism brings death and destroys the environment.
From PERU to CANADA, legislated consultations will not take place!
Mesoamerican Movement Against the Mining Extractivist Model – M4 –
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