Mexico's Indigenous Appeal Local Wind Project

Zapotecs from Unión Hidalgo, Oaxaca, present demand against wind farm project
Photo: Luis Humberto González

La Jornada: Rosa Rojas

Translated by Shaun Twomey

In order to put the brakes on the virtual looting of their communal lands by Demex, a subsidiary of the multinational Spanish enterprise Renovalia Energy, indigenous Zapatecs [one of Mexico’s indigenous people] from Unión Hidalgo, Oaxaca presented an “historic” demand this Tuesday to the Unitarian Agrarian Tribunal (TUA), headquartered in Tuxtepec, that could certainly have international repercussions. In particular, they demanded the immediate suspension of construction work on the Piedra Larga wind farm sponsored by the firm Mexican Wind Development and the annulment of lease contracts signed by the firm that apply to indigenous lands and territory.

MV Note: This is in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a windy lowland between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean, at Oaxaca's border with Chiapas.

Guadalupe Ramírez Castellanos and Esteban López Sánchez, members of the Committee for the Resistance Against the Piedra Larga Wind Project, announced this development and advised that with a lapse of a couple weeks, they hoped that the TUA would order the aforementioned suspension in order to safeguard their farming rights and their collective rights as indigenous people. Otherwise, they said, there would be a continued violation of their rights, criminalization of their protests, contamination of their lands & waters, and the loss of life of birds and terrestrial animals that is being caused by the first stage of the Demex wind project, which is already in operation.

They charged that although Demex offered both huge sums as rent and a possibility for the indigenous to continue using their lands for agricultural and livestock purposes in exchange for these leases, the signed contracts suffer from a plethora of vices, like the seemingly intentional omission of the notion that the land is collective, communal property that required a previously informed and unimpeded consent. In addition, there was no provision for “town hall” assemblies in these contracts where intended changes in the use of the land could be discussed and debated.

In concert with notaries [lawyers who specialize in certifying legal documents], falsified small private property tracts were created to facilitate the signing of individual contracts, which in turn changed the collective character of the lands in question which were previously recognized throughout the indigenous community. This was despite the fact that a previous federal government converted the lands into communal ones through a presidential resolution on June 17, 1964, where a large communal area of 68,112 hectares [168,308 acres] was officially designated in favor of Juchitán de Zaragoza’s farming center.

López Sánchez pointed out that the company failed to explain the various dimensions of the contract to indigenous people in their native Zapotec tongue, and instead they:

“hired a few pretty girls to convince the farmers to rent out their lands, and convince them they did,” he said.

Now, oil discharged from the wind turbines has found its way into wells, streams, and rivers which ultimately dump out into the sea and poison things like crab and shrimp.

Demex actually raised the level of the land in order to install their wind turbines, which in turn flooded tracts and rotted out crops of corn and sorghum as a result. López Sánchez consequently added that wind energy

“isn’t clean energy for us at all, but instead the energy of death.”

Among other organizations participating in the press conference were representatives from the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus in Defense of the Land and Territory. One of them was Bettina Cruz, who has received repeated death threats. Spanish original