Solidarity with the Mapuche & Argentinian Resistance

Be part of a 14 days tour by 3 key representatives from the front lines of resistance in Argentina and Pwelmapu. They are members of the Mapuche resistance, the farmers’ union, and the ecological and ecofeminist movement. Addressing the impact of Javier Milei’s disastrous policies, land grabbing, violation of indigenous rights and fracking expansion. And further demanding the regulation of European finance that supports them. 

Objectives

  • Support the indigenous and non-indigenous movements fighting for ecosystem preservation, environmental justice, and human rights vs the far right surge in league with fossil fuel and land grabbing industry.
  • Stop finance support to fracking industry and demand regulation of fossil fuel finance.

  • Generate support for the resistance of the Mapuche people.

Why those countries?

Switzerland‘s financial and trading centers Zurich and Geneva are fueling the devastation provoked in Argentina by the fossil fuel and agricultural industries. UBS/Credit Suisse and the Swiss National Bank, whose annual general meetings will be held on the 24th and 26th of April, are shareholders in Shell, which is heavily involved in the fracking of gas and oil from the Vaca Muerta field.

At the end of April, the G7 environment and energy ministers will meet in Turin, Italy, in preparation for the June summit in Puglia. The G7 countries are currently projecting us towards an immediate future of +4 degrees, in defiance of the rights of the affected communities and our common good. The G7 group plays a decisive role in regulating the international financial system. It is imperative that it puts in place rules guaranteeing an end to the financing of fossil fuel expansion, the right of local and indigenous communities to say no to gas, coal, and oil projects such as Vaca Muerta, and reparation for the damage done by those directly responsible.

The stakes are high in Brussels. The European Commission is pushing for the signing of the Free Trade Agreement with the MERCOSUR zone, to which Milei’s Argentina belongs. It is doing so in defiance of food sovereignty and the rights of small farmers and indigenous peoples. The European Parliament has just adopted a directive on Corporate Responsibility (Due Diligence). Following intense lobbying, the financial sector has been carefully kept out of this new regulation. European financial regulation is all the more essential. Furthermore, several European companies are collaborating in land grabs and the extractive rush promoted by President Milei’s mutant far right.

19th of April - Global Climate Strike Zurich
6 pm. Helvetia Platz, speeches of Orlando, Maria and Carolina
22nd of April - Public meeting at UNIGE

6:30 – 8:00 pm at MS160 UNIMAIL
panel discussion

24th of April - public meeting in Bern
8:00 pm

Casa d’italia, Bühlstrasse 57

25th of April - online press conference with climate alliance

10:00 am

media contacts get invited

26th of April - AGM of SNB in Bern
join the demonstration in front of Kursaal Bern ( Kornhausstrasse 3) at 10:00 am
30st of April - public meeting in Brussels

6:30 – 9:00 pm at TURBEAN
Avenue Paul Héger 22, Brussels
panel discussion

2nd of May - public meeting in Saint-Gilles

7:30 – 10:00 pm at DK
Rue de Danemark 70b, Saint-Gilles
panel discussion

Orlando

Orlando Javier Carriqueo

Orlando Carriqueo Pignen is Werken (messenger) of the Coordination of the Tehuelche Parliament of Rio Negro. He is originally from the Elel Quimun Mapuche community, currently located in Fiske Menuco, known today as General Roca, but was born in Valcheta, which was Argentina’s first concentration camp on Mapuche territory during the “Desert Campaign” in 1879.

The Coordination of the Mapuche-Tehuelche Parliament of Rio Negro is an organization representing the communities of the province of Rio Negro, which includes some 164 communities. A large number of these communities meet annually in a Parliament that appoints leaders and representatives to carry out their functions. The Parliament’s Coordination Office, divided into 4 regions, comprises eighteen members, including 16 political representatives and 2 werken.

Carolina

Maria Carolina Llorens

María Carolina Llorens coordinates the MNCI Somos Tierra feminist team and is a member of the Vía Campesina Argentina coordination committee. She is an activist with the movement Paysan de Córdoba. Within the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Latin America and the Caribbean, she is a member of the Women’s School coordination team. Social activist in human rights and social ecology organizations since her youth, she was one of the founders of H.I.J.O.S. (Red Nacional Hijos e Hijas por la Identidad y la Justicia), a network formed by the children of people who disappeared during the dictatorship.

Mariana
Mariana Katz

Mariana Katz is a lawyer with a doctorate from the Universidad Nacional del Sur, a degree in Climate Change Management from the Universidad Nacional de Quilmes and a law degree from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA). Since 2009, she has been working with indigenous peoples within SERPAJ Argentina (Le Servicio Paz y Justicia), an organization founded by Nobel Peace Prize winner Adolfo Pérez Esquivel. She represents the people of Andalgalá in their fight against a mega-mine, and advises similar organizations in the province of Catamarca. She also teaches international relations and human rights at the Universidad Nacional de Avellaneda (UNDAV), and participates in research projects on critical pedagogy and human rights at UNS. She is a specialist in the inter-American human rights protection system and has been a guest lecturer at Mercosur’s interdisciplinary course on human rights.

Media Coverage

Pagina 12

30.04.24 – El Parlamento Mapuche llevó a Europa sus reclamos contra el extractivismo
También participan de la gira el Serpaj y el Movimiento Campesino Indígena. El veto a la delegación en la Asamblea del Banco Nacional Suizo.

Watson

29.04.24 – “The SNB is complicit in the suffering that is being inflicted on us”
Orlando Carriqueo wanted to give a speech at the General Meeting of the Swiss National Bank on Friday and explain why the SNB is responsible for the suffering inflicted on the Mapuche in Argentina. The SNB refused him access. In this interview, he explains what the Swiss population needs to know about the SNB’s business.

WOZ

25.04.24 – A carbon bomb in Argentina
Argentinian activists are criticizing Switzerland’s lax policy: the Swiss National Bank and UBS should abandon the actions of companies involved in the Argentinian fracking business.

El Cordillerano

14.04.24 – El werken (vocero) de la Coordinadora del Parlamento Mapuche-Tehuelche de Río Negro, Orlando Carriqueo, viajará a Europa, del 18 de abril al 3 de mayo, invitado por la agrupación suiza BreakFree, con el propósito de conseguir apoyo para los pueblos originarios de esta parte del mundo.

The Situation in Argentina

In Argentina, 27 million people (57.4% of the population) are under the poverty limit. The minimum wage (USD$ 200) has been reduced 14.8% in Jan. 2024. In January the price of the food rose by 26 %. According to La Via Campesina Argentina : «20.6% suffer from food insecurity, while consumers have paid 5.2 times more than the price paid to the producers » explaining « The method of advancement of this anarco-capitalist far right expression tries to provoke chaos to put forward their financial agenda. »The government, led by Javier Milei, advocates for an anarcho-capitalist ideology that aims to dismantle the state and deregulate the economy entirely. Milei’s policies include criminalizing protests, denying the state terrorism of the military dictatorship, and implementing economic deregulation measures.

Farmers situation under Milei

The Emergency Decree 70/2023 bypasses Congress, benefiting select business interests and undermining democratic institutions.

Some key points of the decree are:

  • Derogation of the Law of the Rural Lands that jeopardizes the soil and the water resources that can be hoarded by transnational companies and the vulture funds.
  • Derogation of the Law of Fire, that also paves the way to the land hoarding and it also represents a big setback of in terms of the impacts occurring in forests, grasslands and wetlands, in the middle of a clear climate crisis.
  • We reject the criteria used to add new retentions and to add new taxes to the importations. We consider that the retentions and taxes must be segmented and differentiated. The countryside has a wide range of actors that must be treated differently.
  • Food market deregulation: derogation of the Law of Shelves 27545, Law of supply and observation of prices.

In response, the National Confederation of Workers, Autonomous Workers’ Central, and Workers’ Central organized a national strike on January 24th, joined by millions. Despite opposition and lacking an effective economic plan, the Milei government persists, ignoring proposals for legislation promoting food sovereignty and national development.

Vaca-Muerta

Located in Argentina’s Neuquén Basin, the Vaca Muerta extraction aera accounts for 39% of Argentina’s oil production and 52% of its natural gas. The deposit of Vaca-Muerta is one of the largest fossil gas deposit of the world. The production contains 250,000 oil barrels and about 91 million cubic meters of gas a day. To enable the production of one billion oil barrels a day by 2028, the Argentine State & YPF intend to build a 600 km long pipeline from the province of Neuquén to a new export port at Punta Colorada, crossing a protected area and the territory
of the Mapuche-Tehuelche people of Río Negro, who have publicly expressed their opposition.
Milei now is supporting the oil and gas rush at any cost, while investing little in energy efficiency or community owned renewables. In this he exacerbates the extractive policies of former authorities such as president Kirchner who passed the so-called “Chevron decree” allowing companies that extracted and exported oil & gas from Vaca Muerta to do so without paying taxes.

The Mapuche Resistance

The environmental, social and human rights cost of the exploitation is extremely high. When the fracking projects were made public in August 2013, the Argentinian government put down the resistance of the Mapuches with heavy police violence. « The measurement of poverty in Neuquén, the province where most of the non-conventional oil movement is based, shows, according to the measurement of the year 2023, 40% of poverty. The only spill that reaches us all is the spill of the contamination of the Negro, Limay, Neuquén and Colorado Rivers. » explained Orlando Cariqueo. The Mapuche has suffered and resisted against colonial domination for centuries (Pairican & Urrutia, 2021). Indigenous peoples in Argentina are subject to segregation (HRW, 2022).

The Andalgalá Resistance

The resistance of the Mapuche against the extractivism in Vaca-Muerta is only one example. At multiple places the local communities are resisting against multinational concernes and against Milei’s regime. Mariana Katz is one of the lawyers of the assambly “El Algarrobo”. It is located in Andalgalá, where the local society is protesting peacefully against mining projects, wich are taking place since 1997.

Despite legal victories such as a 2016 Supreme Court ruling declaring the Agua Rica mining activity detrimental to the environment and society, the Municipality of Andalgalá’s attempt to prohibit mining through Ordinance 029/2016 was overturned in December 2020 by the provincial Supreme Court, citing constitutional concerns.

A few days ago, Andalgalá’s demand for the right to live in a healthy environment was received by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), as residents have ongoing legal proceedings before the courts of Catamarca, other provincial courts, and the Federal Judiciary. Therefore, in the presentation made by lawyer, Dr. Mariana A. Katz (on behalf of more than 100 residents), accompanied by the Yopoy Collective (Juan Pablo Vismara, Gabriel Bicinskas, and Marcos Filardi) and endorsed by one of the members of the El Algarrobo Assembly, 248 residents of Andalgalá have been presented as victims of violent actions and human rights violations by the Argentine State and the actions of the Catamarca State, which have been proven in 44 judicial cases.

The International Impact

The key extracting corporations involved are YPF, Pan American Energy and Shell (UK). They are backed by commercial banks such HSBC (UK), Santander (Spain), JPMorgan Chase (USA), or Société Générale (France) and asset managers banking groups such as UBS/Credit Suisse (CH), and the Swiss National Bank. According to Climate Alliance Switzerland, the SNB invested 4.9 billion in six companies involved in oil/gas extraction or transportation in Vaca Muerta, even though it’s not supposed to invest in companies “that significantly harm biodiversity or systematically poison water” (SNB, 2023). According to the Global Oil & Gas Exit List UBS/Credit Suisse have invested 4,472 Billion + 1,335 Billion into Shell, making it the 4th largest investor (Urgewald Jan. 2023).

The UN Committee on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights CESCR warned in 2017 that the Vaca Muerta project expansion will « threaten to release enormous amounts of greenhouse gases, exacerbating climate destabilization ». The complete extraction of reserves in Vaca Muerta would significantly reduce the remaining global carbon budget to achieve the Paris Agreement. The Environment and Natural Resources Foundation (FARN) shown that the fracking industry provoqued more than 400 hundred earthquakes during the last ten years.

Partners of the tour