Yaqui Tribal Authority’s Jailing in Water Conflict Signals Need to Implement Environmental Justice
Yaqui Tribal Authority’s Jailing in Water Conflict Signals Need to Implement Environmental Justice
By Talli Nauman | 20 / September / 2014
Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico — The Sept. 11 jailing of Yoeme (Yaqui) Traditional Tribal Secretary Mario Luna Romero was a wake-up call for environmental and human rights defenders globally.
Symptomatic of escalating repression against indigenous community members who refuse to conform with free trade’s increasing demand for resources, Luna’s arrest on allegedly false charges sparked widespread grassroots response and highlighted the imperative of forging a united front against further abuses of environmental activists.
The most visible leader of the Yoeme resistance to Sonora Gov. Guillermo Padrés Elías illegal aqueduct construction project to divert Yaqui River water from its rightfully entitled users in the tribe’s eight villages, Luna immediately declared himself a political prisoner. Luna was detained in the Yoeme village of Vicam and incarcerated in a Hermosillo federal penitentiary after returning to Sonora from a visit across the border state to Arizona.
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About 100 organizations represented there declared: “In the last 30 years, institutional powers and the powers behind them have carried out a systematic dismantling of the State and of the legal framework in Mexico. A series of reforms to the Constitution and laws of a structural character have been imposed, as well as the ratification and the strengthening of free trade agreements, which have destroyed the norms that permit the peoples to defend the social fabric and community life.”
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In Sonora, the ruling cadre, anxious to please foreign investors in the automobile and beverage industries, has seen fit to appropriate the Yaqui River water necessary for agricultural stability in the rural and indigenous areas. They have repeatedly ignored federal orders to desist from building and operating the Independence Aqueduct.
The state government’s blatant disregard for the legal system it is charged with upholding resonates with a pattern long established in Sonora and bodes ill for the future.
More:
http://www.cipamericas.org/archives/12899
