DAYS of Action Against Free Trade
And Extractive Industries
Defend Indigenous Communities and the Environment!
Wednesday, Sept 22nd through Friday, SEPT 24th in Manhattan, NYC
PROTESTS:
Wednesday, September 22, 11:30 a.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Protest Sebastián Piñera, President of Chile
AMERICAS SOCIETY - AS/COA, 680 Park Ave @ 68th St (6 to 68 Street-Hunter College /Lexington Avenue )
Wednesday, September 22, 2010 6:30 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
Protest Alan García, President of Peru
AMERICAS SOCIETY -AS/COA, 680 Park Ave @ 68th St (6 to 68 Street-Hunter College /Lexington Avenue )
Thursday, September 23, 2010 7:30 p.m. - 10:30 p.m.,
Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia
Essex House, 160 Central Park South (59th Street) between 7th and 6th Avenues Q to 57th Street and 7th Avenue or F to 57th Street and 6th Avenue.
Friday, September 24, 2010 11:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Leonel Fernández, President of the Dominican Republic
AMERICAS SOCIETY - AS/COA, 680 Park Ave @ 68th St (6 to 68 Street-Hunter College /Lexington Avenue )
With heads of state from around the world in New York this week for the High-level Plenary Meeting of the UN General Assembly, the Council of the Americas, an alliance of corporations pushing for the expansion of free trade, will hosts a series of talks with the presidents of Chile, Peru, Colombia, and the Dominican Republic – all countries facing environmentally devastating resource extraction projects linked to human rights violations. The talks are sponsored by some the world's most destructive corporations, including oil giant Chevron and mining companies Barrick Gold and Freeport-McMoRan.
NAFTA-style free trade agreements, which encourage foreign investment by extractive corporations include state-investor provisions that give corporations the right to sue governments for enforcing their environmental laws. These provisions have emboldened environmentally destructive corporations, increased repressive conflicts with indigenous communities, and exacerbated the destruction of pristine ecosystems and the lands of peasant and indigenous communities. Chile, Peru, and the Dominican Republic currently have free trade agreements with the US (the agreements with Peru and the Dominican Republic were passed under the current sitting presidents), and a free trade agreement with Colombia, strongly supported by President Santos, awaits a vote in the US Congress.
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Wednesday, September 22, 11:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Protest Sebastián Piñera, President of Chile!
AS/COA 680 Park Avenue New York, NY, 680 Park Ave @ 68th St (6 to 68 Street-Hunter College /Lexington Avenue )
From thousands of people marching through the streets of Vallenar, to the non-violent road blockades, people have mobilized in Chile to oppose the Pascua Lama/Valedero project. The project endangers the natural and cultural balance of these valleys, as well as its water supply, affecting around 70,000 people in Chile and 24,000 in Argentina. To provide energy for the mining project, Chile's Patagonia, one of the most wild, unspoiled, and beautiful places on the planet, is being threatened by a massive project to build dams on two of its fast flowing wild rivers, the Baker and the Pascua. If the dam projects are not stopped, they will flood thousands of acres of wildlife habitat. In addition, a proposed transmission line needed to carry electricity from the dams would be one of the longest in the world, extending more than 1,400 miles and cutting through national parks, reserves and wildlife sanctuaries.
Additional information at http://tradejustice.net/?page=Chile
Sponsored by TradeJustice NY Metro and Global Justice for Animals and the Environment
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Wednesday, September 22, 2010 6:30 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
Protest Alan García, President of Peru
AS/COA 680 Park Avenue, 680 Park Ave @ 68th St (6 to 68 Street-Hunter College /Lexington Avenue )
Boasting some of the richest biodiversity on the planet, the Peruvian Amazon is under attack by mining, logging (much of it illegal), natural gas, oil, coal, cattle grazing, and plantation agriculture.
As a result, wildlife species are being driven to extinction and indigenous communities are being displaced. Instead of protecting his nation's unique and irreplaceable ecosystems and defending indigenous communities, Garcia has used the pretext of the US-Peru Free Trade Agreement to worked to turn indigenous lands over to corporations and increase the rate of destruction for profit. Nonviolent uprisings by peasant farmers and indigenous people have met violent and deadly state repression, indigenous leaders have been driven into hiding, while the murder of community anti-mining activists has gone unpunished.
New York City is the largest municipal user of tropical rainforest wood in North America, primarily exported from Peru. Cumaru is now the rainforest wood of choice for the NYC Parks Department and much of the ipê being used in the city for municipal projects is from Peru.
Environmentalists have been working years to ban tropical rainforest wood imports, but Government Pataki committed New York to a side agreement to the Peru Free Trade Agreement that limits a state's ability to set ethical selective purchasing standards and could open the door to a legal challenge of the ban by Peruvian wood exporters.
Peruvians protest Barrick in the Ancash region year after year with a regional 48 hour strike, supported by local politicians. The region is divided by Barrick's activities here and for the last two years, protesters have died in confrontations with the police during the strike. Meanwhile, Barrick has reportedly employed many of these police.
Notorious for environmental and human rights violations in West Papua, mining company Freeport-McMoRan is pursuing a major expansion of a copper mine amidst strikes by workers demanding fairer compensation.
Additional info at http://tradejustice.net/?page=PeruReport
Sponsored by TradeJustice NY Metro, Global Justice for Animals and the Environment, Rainforest Relief, the Tiksi Group, and the New York Climate Action Group.
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Thursday, September 23, 2010 7:30 p.m. - 10:30 p.m.
Protest Juan Manuel Santos, President of Colombia!
Essex House, 160 Central Park South (59th Street) between 7th and 6th Avenues Q to 57th Street and 7th Avenue or F to 57th Street and 6th Avenue.
Colombia is considered to have the worst human rights record in the western hemisphere, with the highest rate of unionist killings on the planet (36 union leaders killed so far this year according to the CUT labor federation), second highest level of internal displacement after the Sudan (estimated at between 3,303,979 and 4,915,579 by the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center) and fifth highest rate of journalist assassinations with 13 unsolved murders of journalists according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
Newly elected Colombian President Santos seeks to continue the neoliberal policies that have increased poverty, unemployment and social inequality in Colombia . He is in favor of free trade agreements with the US and EU that will hand over even more control to the multinationals. He welcomes US bases in Colombia. Prior to his election as president, Santos was Colombia's Minister of Defense – at the height of the false positives scandal - in which thousands of Colombians have been executed by the armed forces and then dressed up in guerrilla fatigues to pretend they had fallen in combat. Human rights groups argue that Santos should stand trial at the International Criminal Court for this atrocity. Santos argues that the United States Colombian Free Trade Agreement will help defeat armed rebels and combat cocaine trafficking. In reality, the agreement will expand unsustainable monoculture industries in Colombia, displacing local farmers and forcing them to resort to illegal activity such as coca production, trafficking in cocaine and endangered species, and illegal logging. To combat an increase in illegal activity, the United States will expand its "War on Drugs" – particularly its toxic fumigation program.
According to the Sierra Club, "As written, the agreement puts the profit of foreign corporations before domestic environmental and health regulations. The agreement weakens the screening process for food imports to the U.S. while also expanding the monopoly of U.S. drug companies, making access to life-saving drugs even more difficult in Colombia, according to the Pan-American Health Organization.
Colombia, which encompasses vast tracks of Amazon rainforest, contains tremendous biodiversity and natural resources that could be opened up to corporate plunder without sufficient environmental safeguards. Paramilitary groups continue to use death threats and murder to seize subsistence farmers' land for palm oil bio-diesel production. This practice would likely increase due to growing foreign investment in palm oil coupled with weak human rights protections in the Colombia FTA."
Additional info at http://tradejustice.net/?page=ColombiaExtReport
Sponsored by Citizens for Fair Trade, TradeJustice NY Metro, Global Justice for Animals and the Environment
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Friday, September 24, 2010 11:30 p.m. - 2:30 p.m.
Protest Leonel Fernández, President of the Dominican Republic!
AS/COA 680 Park Avenue, 680 Park Ave @ 68th St (6 to 68 Street-Hunter College /Lexington Avenue)
Barrick Gold Corp. will reopen a formerly state-owned mine in the central Dominican Republic.
Barrick plans to spend about US$2.6 billion (€1.7 billion) on the Pueblo Viejo mine in what will be the largest private investment in Dominican history Activists in the Dominican Republic are demanding the cancellation of the contract for gold extraction between the Dominican State and Canadian multinational Barrick Gold on the grounds that it is unconstitutional and damaging to the environment. Because of the US-Central American -Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), Barrick, a Canadian company needs only to establish a US subsidiary in order to sue for unlimited sums to compensate for lost potential profits if the government of the Dominican Republic accedes to public pressure to cancel the project. President Fernandez signed CAFTA-DR into law and is thus directly responsible for this dilemma.
Additional info at http://tradejustice.net/?page=DominicanRepublic
Sponsored by TradeJustice NY Metro and Global Justice for Animals and the Environment
About the Corporate Sponsors
Citigroup
"Citi and Bank of America both have a way to go before they can say they are no longer financing Appalachian mountain destruction. " - Rainforest Action Network
Freeport-McMoRan
Freeport-McMoRan's mine in Indonesia has been criticized for stealing the region's wealth, evicting local people from ancestral lands and polluting the environment. The company has also been criticized for paying Indonesian security forces to guard the mine. In West Papua, Freeport dumped a billion tons of mine into a jungle river in what had been one of the world's last untouched landscapes.
Barrick Gold
Barrick Gold, the world's largest gold mining company, is accused of avoiding responsibility for the destructive environmental legacy of its projects, aligning itself with corrupt politicians, and employing police who violently suppress (and sometimes kill) mine critics.
Learn more at http://protestbarrick.net
Mizuho
Mizuho Bank is a financier of The Kashagan oil field in the Caspian Sea, one of the largest oil fields discovered in the last few decades. Civil society groups have been raising concerns about the environmental and public health dangers associated with Kashagan. An international Fact Finding Mission in the Northern Caspian region, conducted in September 2007, found evidence of extremely high environmental and social impacts and risks, and violations of international standards, including the Equator Principles and IFC Performance Standards, in the development of Kashagan's offshore and onshore operations. The Caspian Sea is the largest reserve of fresh water in Central Asia. The natural life of a whole continent depends on it. If the oil industry destroys this sea, Kazakhstan will remain behind with a deserted land and a dead sea.
Chevron
15 Thames Street, Brooklyn NY, 11206
Phone: (718) 880-7979 Email: activism@wetlands-preserve.org
www.wetlands-preserve.org * www.freetradekillsanimals.org * www.tradejustice.net * www.stopperufta.org * www.furfreenyc.org * www.foodnotfur.org
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Celebrando 10 anos "On Line"..2009
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