A large meeting took place last February in Rosita, a village on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua, attended by representatives of indigenous communities (Sumus and Miskitos), local and regional authorities, NGOs, community and religious leaders and many others. The reason: the illegal activities of the Korean transnational company Kimyung, which received a concession in 1994 from the Nicaraguan central government -at the time headed by President Violeta Chamorro- to log an area of 62,000 hectares of forest in indigenous territories.
Bulletin articles
The municipality of San Blas, Nayarit, Mexico is witnessing with great concern how the overdevelopment that has taken place in nearby Puerto Vallarta has attracted the attention of big investing consortia and spurred the ambitions of politicians and senior government officials from this country, resulting in a hoarding of lands, federal zones and mangroves for the purpose of commercial development.
In a press conference during the recent Summit of the Americas held in Santiago, Chile, Mr. James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, admitted that the Bank's support to the Pangue hydroelectric project in the Bio Bio River watershed, in Chile, had been a mistake. Mr. Wolfensohn said that the WB had performed “bad work” during the evaluation of the environmental impact of the project, since the Pehuenche indigenous peoples that inhabit the area had not been consulted.
We have received the following contribution from Leonardo Acurero, through our Venezuelan friends from AMIGRANSA, related to the actors behind the scenes involved in the recent fires that devastated the Brazilian state of Roraima . A providential rain has extinguished it but the danger of future fires is still looming.
“The fire of development and occupation covers Roraima.
One of the more widely publicized arguments for the promotion of industrial tree plantations says that fast growing plantations help to alleviate the main pressures on native forests and consequently help to preserve them. This argument was been proven false in all cases and Chile is no exception.
In WRM Bulletin No. 10 we included the article "Comments on WWF's 'Forests for life' campaign", as having been produced by Paul Romeijn, Director of Treemail. We have now learned that those comments -which we had received through Paul Romeijn- were actually written by Prof. Julio Cesar Centeno. We apologize to both for the confusion.
Ricardo Carrere was invited to participate in the Environmental Forum of the Peoples' Summit of the Americas, held in Santiago, Chile from 15 to 18 April. In his presentations he emphasized on the underlying causes of deforestation and on the need to implement policies which ensure the conservation of forests and the respect of the rights of peoples that inhabit or depend on them for their survival. He also participated actively in the Forest Group discussions, which resulted in a document aimed at influencing the region's governments (see under Americas)
We have recently created the WRM web page as an effort to facilitate the dissemination of the Movement's viewpoints and relevant information to a wider audience. At the same time, it is our aim to put the web page at the service of our affiliates and friends, who can use it as a means to both access relevant information and to feed it with information about their own specific concerns.
The tenth issue of our Bulletin has been published in Spanish and distributed to Spanish and Portuguese-speaking people. Future issues of the Bulletin will be published in both languages. We hope that this innovation will contribute to broaden our contacts in this linguistic area of the world. We are now producing two mailing lists -one for Spanish-speakers and another for the rest. Those who wish to receive both versions of the bulletin are requested to let us know.
The March-April issue of "World Watch" (published by the Worldwatch Institute) includes an article by Ashley Mattoon on pulpwood plantations ("Paper Forests"), which constitutes an important contribution to clarify this issue to a wide audience. The WRM Internacional Secretariat contributed with comments to the author's first draft.
We have received a letter signed by Mr. Stephen Kakfwi, Minister of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development of Northern Territories, Canada, as a response to the one sent by WRM International Secretariat on February 25, 1998, expressing our concern on the issuance of logging rights in the Cameron Hills, a territory occupied by the Deh Cho indigenous people. Mr. Kakfwi assures that his Government "will not permit any operation to cause serious ecological damage" and is "quite prepared to work with the Deh Cho First Nations."
Responding to a request of our friends of CIMI, the WRM International Secretariat disseminated among WRM members and friends the more recent news about the long struggle of the Tupinikim and Guarani for their traditional lands (see below). We also sent letters to Brazilian authorities -including President Fernando Henrique Cardozo- expressing our concern for this situation and asking them to review their decision to expel the missionary Winfried Overbeek from the country, whose only “crime” has been to defend the indigenous peoples in their claims.