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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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.