By Pepe Mateos, on August 21, 2023.
The Third Malón de la Paz in Buenos Aires
The Third Malón de la Paz (Third March for Peace) arrived in Buenos Aires on August 1st after traveling half the country and since that day they have been waiting in front of the Argentina Supreme Court to explain their complaints against the institutional violence that the province of Jujuy is experiencing after the reform of the provincial Constitution by Governor Gerardo Morales.
“We demand that the Supreme Court of Justice rule on the unconstitutionality of the reform promoted by Gerardo Morales, and call for federal intervention in the province and the cessation of the repression exercised against the communities and the people of Jujuy that persists with arrests, charges and unpayable fines against the leaders of the indigenous communities,” says Néstor Jerez, chief of the Ocloya people.
“We have been here in Plaza Lavalle for 20 days in the open, waiting to be heard. In Jujuy there is no rule of law, there is no justice. All instances of claim are exhausted and that is why we are appealing to the Nation, knocking on the door of the three powers,” added the indigenous leader.
“We understand how all this works”, Jerez explains, “it is a new regime, a new world order that implies favoring the concentrated economic power along with complicity of the governments and the powers, where what is discussed are the interests, in this case the natural resources, that is why the reform in Jujuy has been made to favor these economic groups, violating all the human rights recognized in international treaties, the rights of guarantees established in the Constitution have been violated. It is a reform that goes against the National Constitution. We see that in the province Governor Gerardo Morales has ended up being an instrument of the economic powers turning Jujuy into a laboratory experiment with the objective of implementing it at the national level. It is important to know that this is not only an issue of Jujuy but of all the Argentine people and it is necessary to react against these outrages. With this reactionary reform the province is taking advantage of the territories of the communities, of the fiscal lands, of the water and prohibits the people from even making claims. This represents the continuity of the genocide of the native peoples and reduces them to a situation of slavery”, affirms Jerez.
The claim that the Third Malón expresses is one of gravity and complexity that cannot be approached if it is not analyzed in the context of the struggle for natural resources and the transition of industrialized countries towards alternative energy sources, with lithium and green hydrogen at the forefront, which puts non-core countries in trouble and generally indebted. This is producing serious consequences for the environment, the communities and the people who inhabit the territories from which the resources are extracted.
Gustavo Koenig, sociologist, explains this problem with extreme clarity.
In his analysis he demonstrates how strategic resources, in particular lithium, are being exposed to corporate plunder through this new neo liberal reform approved by the Morales government, which also includes the danger of fragmentation of the national territory, bypassing the National Constitution.
Koenig goes on to state, “This provincial legislation would provide an example for other provinces to also want to legislate through other provincial constitutions the plundering of their natural resources by the large corporations”.
The protestors now in Buenos Aires are In the open, since the police of Mayor Rodríguez Larreta does not allow them to install a minimum plastic awning under which to shelter the 200 members of the Malón who are camped in Plaza Lavalle, in the same place where in 1991 the retirees led by Norma Plá began their epic struggle for the increase of pensions against the government of Menem and its Minister of Economy, Domingo Cavallo.
Nobel Peace Prize winner, Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, denounced the “mistreatment” by the government of the city of Buenos Aires with the 200 indigenous people of the Third Malón de la Paz of Jujuy. “It is discrimination, racism and intolerance. The indigenous people are on vigil in Plaza Lavalle and not only do they not give them tents and chemical toilets, but they want to make them pay an insurance of millions of pesos,” he declared this week.
If there is something that the members of Malón are very clear about, it is that theirs is not a sectorial claim of the indigenous communities, although they are the spokespersons. They reaffirm their identity as part of the Argentine State and emphasize that the problem of natural resources is a problem of national sovereignty that encompasses all the inhabitants of this Nation. In spite of this, they have very little support from other political forces.
Ultimately, what is being settled through these conflict situations are the paradigms and contradictions of our civilization; it is necessary to continue exploiting natural resources to maintain a state of affairs that leads to an inevitable collapse. Lithium is needed to produce batteries for electric cars that travel the streets of the most developed and privileged world, leaving the exploited territories devastated and polluted. Oil is needed to continue producing and consuming rampantly.
Juan Domingo Perón said in 1972 in a document he prepared on the occasion of the first worldwide summit on environmental issues, held that year in Stockholm,
“We believe that the time has come for all the peoples and governments of the world to become aware of the suicidal march that humanity has undertaken through the pollution of the environment and the biosphere, the squandering of natural resources, the unrestrained growth of the population and the overestimation of technology and the need to immediately reverse the direction of this march, through a joint international action”.
Fifty years later, the issue has worsened to the point of endangering the survival of the human species and the irreversible deterioration of the environment.
The native peoples and communities affected by the exploitation of minerals, extensive monocultures or any other type of indiscriminate extractivism are seeking to build resistance and awareness of this and to seek policies to reverse this state of affairs.