Earth Watch June 26: How to support Sunrise Movement activists and Yaqui Water Defenders
News from the epicenter of the environmental movement
Sunrise Movement activists arrested after marching 400 miles to demand Congress fund the Civilian Climate Corps
Eight activists with the Sunrise Movement were arrested in Houston, Texas on Monday in front of the home of Texas Senator Ted Cruz after the group had marched 400 miles from New Orleans, Louisiana in a demonstration aimed at pressuring leaders in Washington and throughout the South to take robust action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The protest comes as the Sunrise Movement has been advocating for years for a Green New Deal to combat climate change, and more recently pushing a specific program called the Civilian Climate Corps. With the Biden administration in power, Sunrise activists may have thought they finally had an ally in the White House, but recently the Biden administration has sent mixed signals on whether or not any investments in clean energy will be considered in the upcoming infrastructure bill known as the American Jobs Plan.
Jenna Hanes, an activist with the Sunrise Movement who was arrested at the protest, told Branch Out in an email, “I wanted to do something that mattered in the region I love. The South deserves so much better than we get from our representation, and it takes leftists in our area to believe in that potential. This march, for me, was as much about the future of leftist thought in the south as it was about the CCC [Civilian Climate Corps].” President Biden established the Civilian Climate Corps in January by issuing an executive order, but so far the CCC has not received any money. Funding for the CCC was written into the American Jobs Plan, but climate initiatives have not received any Republican support in congress.
Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who has deep ties to the fossil fuel industry, has signaled that he will not vote for the American Jobs Plan unless it is supported by Republicans in addition to Democrats. This position has dashed the hopes that the CCC could be funded through the process of budget reconciliation, which would allow the American Jobs Plan to pass with only fifty votes if every Democratic Senator votes for it, including Manchin. More protests like the march from New Orleans to Houston are meant to pressure politicians across the political spectrum to take a more aggressive public policy approach to deal with the climate crisis.
Branch Out asked Hanes how people reading this could show solidarity with the protesters and this is what she had to say: “We need your donations to our Gofundme to cover our legal costs! This will help us recover from the financial portion of the burden of being arrested.” To support the legal defense GoFundMe, please follow this link and donate whatever you can: GoFundMe Link
To read more about resistance to the fossil fuel industry throughout Texas, take a look back at these articles published by Branch Out:
Fossil fuel divestment around the world and in the heart of Texas
The Permian Highway Pipeline and the battle for Texas' future
Corporate America is implicated in murder of Yaqui Water Defenders and Genocide of the Yaqui People
In the last two months, three Water Defenders of the Yaqui Tribal Nation in Northern Mexico have been murdered or disappeared due to their spirited efforts to prevent the ongoing theft of water by the Sonoran Government which is devastating their community’s health, livelihoods and ecosystems.
The murder of Luis Urbano Dominguez Mendoza and Agustin Valdez along with the disappearance of Tomas Rojo Valencia is part of a larger international trend targeting and oppressing Indigenous Land and Water Defenders who are on the frontlines of environmental struggle.
The Yaqui Tribal Nation has been fighting against the theft of its water for hundreds of years. The Yaqui River is the primary source of the Tribe’s subsistence, livelihoods, and spiritual and cultural traditions. It has been coveted by colonial governments since the Spanish first invaded, due to its provision of great fertility which makes the surrounding region the most agriculturally productive in Mexico.
Over the centuries, in response to repeated thefts and diversions for colonial agriculture, the Yaqui have been forced to fight for their right to honor and subsist with their homeland’s water. They have survived decades of enslavement, deportation, and killings during the course of this long struggle.
A high point seemed to come with the signing of a 1937 Accord, which secured a promise from the Mexican government to not divert any more than half of the River’s output from the Yaqui Nation. Yet today, due to an increasing number of aqueducts and diversion projects which have broken this promise over many decades, the Yaqui do not have even 1/4th of what they need for their agriculture. What water they do receive is regularly polluted and responsible for a growing health crisis among the tribe.
With temperatures rising due to global warming and drought worsening in the region, the Sonoran government’s response has been to steal even more water from the Yaqui people. Despite two federal injunctions prohibiting the construction of a new aqueduct, this project that began in 2010 now diverts 50% of the Yaqui’s water. Altogether, such projects have had a “negative ecological impact … so drastic it provoked a phenomenon of total migration of local fauna”
Meanwhile, American agribusiness and fossil fuel companies are furthering the crisis by partnering with the Sonoran government and profiting from the dispossession and oppression of the Yaqui. The latest example is San Diego-based Sempra Energy, which has been building a fossil fuel gas pipeline through Yaqui territory, threatening at-risk endemic species.
Despite reassurances from Sempra that the gas pipeline will pose no threat to Yaqui water, one of its domestic subsidiaries Southern California Gas was responsible for the largest methane leak in U.S. history in 2015, displacing 8000 people from their homes. The executive director responsible, Dennis Arriola, faced no legal or professional consequences and was instead ‘disciplined’ by Sempra Energy via a transfer to the board of a Mexican subsidiary, Sempra Mexico.
The company’s lawlessness was on full display in Mexico when it ignored a federal injunction in 2016 ordering the project to stop. Yaqui Water Defenders were forced to take law enforcement into their own hands and disabled the pipeline which was illegally trespassing across their national territory in 2018. As a result, Arizona’s gas exports to Mexico plunged by 37%.
With Yaqui farming rapidly becoming impossible, endemic health problems rising, resistance leaders being murdered and the ecological-spiritual foundation of Yaqui culture being increasingly stolen and destroyed, Yaqui leaders have not minced words in naming the parties responsible for this ongoing atrocity guilty of genocide.
In the words of Rosemary Tona-Aguirre, a member of the Yaqui Tribe in Arizona, “It is genocide because they’re poisoning the river with fertilizer and pesticides from big agribusiness, a lot of them American owned, and they’re stealing the water for use in Hermosillo and other places. That’s money and food taken away from the Yaqui. The Rio Yaqui is just the life of everybody. They use it daily. They need that water and they need it for ceremony.”
As Mario Luna, a secretary of traditional Yaqui authorities, concludes, “the Yaqui River is a structural part of our life and with this theft of our water, they are condemning us to death as a people.”
Take Action!
Make a contribution and join the letter-writing campaign to help free Yaqui Water Defender Fidencio Aldama, who has been a political prisoner in Mexico since 2016.