Carbo-fascism triumphant in the USA – Indigenous advances at COP16 in Colombia

Donald Trump’s resounding victory forces us to anticipate the measures that the new US president and his allies will be deploying in the very near future. Some of their clearest targets are multilateralism, “enemies from within”, Caribbean-Latin American migrants and efforts to protect the great ecological balances.

Thousands of kilometers to the south, COP16 Biodiversity, which ended a few days ago in Cali, gave rise to diametrically opposed expectations. The aim of the Petro government hosting the event was to turn it into a “People’s COP” and move towards ” Peace with Nature “.

Unsurprisingly, the so-called “developed” states refused to contribute to the funding needed to halt the immense losses in biodiversity that all studies document. Indigenous peoples, on the other hand, forged ahead. Their representatives obtained the creation of a subsidiary body associated with the framework agreement, enshrining their decisive contribution to the preservation of biodiversity and the major ecological balances.

We attended some of the preliminary discussions between the Colombian Indigenous peoples’ organizations Permanent Consultation Table (MPC) and Minister Susana Muhamad’s team, then we have been part of the Bogota discussions between members of the International Indigenous Forum on Biodiversity, the Colombian government and UNEP, and finally the twelve days of the Conference in Cali.

With the support of the Colombian and Brazilian governments, as well as international civil society networks, indigenous organizations won an autonomous space in the negotiation zone, launched a new Coalition of the Peoples of the Amazon and were able to defend the contribution of their systems of thought.

Social-political principles such as the Seven Generations Principle of the Iroquois Confederacy in North America, the Sumak Kawsay of the Amaichas in Argentina, the Ubuntu of the Bantu in East Africa, the Whakapapa of the Maori in New Zealand, or the Siida system of governance of the Sami in northern Europe explain why the peoples who developed them are often at the forefront of the defense of the environmental commons.