Struggles for the Forests
When corporations destroy forests, or restrict or even prohibit access to forest peoples' territories, they place communities' ways of life and their very existence at risk. WRM supports forest peoples' struggles to defend their territories, and their right to decide how to live, and how to use the forests they depend on.
The government claims that small-scale agriculture is responsible for deforestation. But this claim ignores government policies that drive land-use changes and destructive markets as well as the exclusion of indigenous peoples through the creation of reserves.
The Waterway aims to connect the Amazon to the world. But that argument is based on the idea that we are disconnected in the Amazon. That is not true. What it really wants to do is place the Amazon in service of capital, razing peoples.
Before, conservation organizations were focused on raising money to create protected areas in forests supposedly threatened with destruction; today, they constitute a bona fide transnational “industry” that manages and controls areas that go far beyond forests.
The creation of the Maya Biosphere Reserve has been legitimizing a destructive model: infrastructure and energy projects, hand-in-hand with Protected Areas “without people.” While conservation NGOs fatten their portfolios, peasant and indigenous communities are displaced, or conditioned to depend on NGOs and the market.
Fires in the Amazon are occurring more frequently and with greater intensity. But who is really burning the forests?
