We recognize the great risks that environmental defenders take to stand up to power, and understand that the collection of visual evidence is only one strategy communities use to protect their environmental human rights. We hope to support this resistance by sharing the Video as Evidence Environmental Defense Guide throughout the coming months via our global campaign that amplifies the calls for Earth Justice. Join us by re-posting our materials or retweeting us using the hashtag: #Video4Earth. 

Read from the full blog post by Dalila Mujagic and Meghana Bahar.

Since we began working with the All Eyes on the Amazon (AEA) project, we have lost three from our community. This rivals the pace at which we lost friends from our work on Syria and illustrates the threat level that environmental human rights defenders face.

All of the defenders harassed and killed have stories similar to Paulo Paulino Guajajara: they are ordinary people who have been living on their land for generations, and when they stand up to protect their homes, they come up against companies’ private security, state forces, contract killers, or teams of aggressive lawyers. It is the same everywhere WITNESS works to support land defenders.

Environmental health is the umbrella human rights issue. If we fail to protect our land, air, water and atmosphere, not only will we prevent solutions to human rights abuses, we will exacerbate them. And the rainforest is at the heart of this. Deeply respected conservation biologists believe that once 25% of the Brazilian rainforest has been destroyed, the rainforest will disappear.

It’s already 20% deforested, and logging is spiking under Bolsonaro. Paulino is not only protecting the Brazilian forest, he is protecting New York City from deadly hurricanes like Sandy (coming in at over $70 billion in damages), California from destructive wildfires, and coastal regions from massive floods.

The loss of Paulino is not only a tremendous loss for the Brazilian and AEA communities, it is a loss for the global community because when defenders like Paulino stand up, they stand up for each and every one of us.

Add your name to this petition to tell Bolsonaro’s government to save the Amazon Rainforest and protect the lands of indigenous and traditional communities.

This Caravan is the newest iteration of an international cohort of media activists borne out of the Video For Change (V4C) network. In 2013 WITNESS co-organized the first pan-American regional V4C convening in Mexico City. It spurred lasting relationships and collaborations which led to the 2016 Mutirão media convening in Brazil to expose the injustices faced by favelas during the 2016 Summer Olympics held in Rio, and most recently the powerful video advocacy work and indigenous rights victories secured by the work of V4C trainee Tlachinollan and Mexico’s Júba Wajiín community.

In 2016, a convening was hosted in exchange with communities and organizations in Honduras. The organizers quickly recognized the increasingly alarming landscape of human rights violations in the country including evictions, criminalization of human rights defenders, and direct threats to land rights protectors. This year, The Latin American Coordination of Film and Communication of Indigenous Peoples (CLACPI) has provided a framework and activities for Voces de Mesoameríca to address those threats in Honduras, in addition to similar challenges in Mexico and Guatemala, with participants hailing from across the Americas including Red Tzikin, COPNIH, and Article 19.

The Caravan will offer various spaces for collaborative exchange, sharing of participatory methodology, and practical workshops on video techniques and media production. It will also work with community initiatives to bolster more independent media broadcasts and exchange of content on various platforms including community radio and social media, covering land rights and indigenous land protectors. Further training topics will include:

• Video editing  
• Community television
• Video as evidence                                                                                               
• Digital photography
• Journalism (genres, formats, reporting)

We look forward to sharing back stories, learnings, and experiences when our Program Manager and V4C organizer Laura Salas (below) returns from her Caravan travels. You can follow updates from the Voces Mesoamericana Caravan on their website (en Español). In the meantime, here’s a hello from the road.

The Mexican constitution guarantees that indigenous communities will be asked about how their land can be developed or used. As the community built a legal challenge to the mining contract, the government tried to argue that they weren’t, in fact, an indigenous community and therefore had no right to protest the arrangement.

For the past five years, WITNESS has been working with the Júba Wajiín community to tell their story and defend their land. We helped create videos including “Júba Wajiín: Resistance in the Mountain of Guerrero,” supporting their land rights case. One of the videos targeted the Supreme Court judge overseeing the case. It focused on proving that the Júba Wajiín were, in fact, indigenous people since that was being contested by the government. Scenes included in the video showed traditional lifestyle, farming, native languages, and customs. And we helped them show how mining would destroy their land and livelihoods.

The video was a crucial part of the Júba Wajiín’s biggest victory in July 2017, when the federal court ruled the Mexican state has a constitutional obligation to respect indigenous land rights, and that mining operations could not continue without the community’s input. An ally noted that the ruling is an “unprecedented achievement” for indigenous land rights activists working against open-pit mining, adding that, for the first time, the Ministry of Economy “must comply with its constitutional and conventional obligations regarding the rights of indigenous peoples” when considering mining rights.

After the historic ruling in 2017, the Ministry of Economy appealed the decision. The appeal currently rests in the hands of the Circuit Court in Acapulco, Guerrero state’s capital. In order to highlight the importance of this case and make sure that the Júba Wajiín secure justice, WITNESS and Valerio Amado Mauro, President of Communal Property of Júba Wajiín screened the documentary at a film festival organized and hosted by the Mexican Supreme Court. At the screening, the community’s lawyer called upon the Court to bring about a final resolution to the case.

With this collective effort, WITNESS helped ensure that the voices of the Júba Wajiín were heard by Mexico’s highest court, by lawmakers, fellow citizens and grassroots activists. It also paves the way for many other indigenous communities who might want or need to use video protect and defend their rights and their land against extractive industries and government interests.