corporate violence

This is - it bears saying - a work in progress; Eritreans, Afghans and the Sudanese are every bit as brutalised as Syrians, the latter are not the ‘special case’ some tabloids have sought to define them as – a cherry-picked victim by which we superficially re-legitimise World War Two narratives of safe-havens and our own morality. This is not to say that we can or should take infinite refugees, rather, that we must give according to our own ability and the needs of others, and that our foreign policies ought be waged (if that is still the correct verb) in a fashion that considers these human repercussions and where they flee to.

My own position on how much we might do is, probably, more utopian than most. I love to imagine British people talking of the successes and difficulties faced in integrating the Syrian couple now living with them for six months. Of people telling their boss they’ll be late for work because of dropping-off an adopted child at an English class – the boss understanding because his neighbour is running a day care centre for similar reasons. I fantasise about the idea of us all being forced to interrupt our business as usual, being reminded that millions of ruined lives and our ability to help a little was worth more than what the damn markets are saying. Sure, plenty of it is fantasy, but, there again, a week ago the UK was to take a few hundred Syrians. Next week, already with a certainty that that number will have increased, tens of thousands will march on Downing Street to demand more.

I simply believe that people are good and moral, especially where an agenda can be cleared of ulterior motives and polling data-induced paralysis, at which point you let people make up their own mind as to whether they like helping or vilifying those in need.

societies have an impulse for compassion, and where that impulse is continuously stifled – where we are consistently bludgeoned with ideas that we haven’t the time, the capital, the empathy – we eventually come to believe it. Western society needs to be reminded that it can stand for change and stand for good, not only for a cheap fiscal orthodoxy; it is vitally important that we seize this moment, for it is in times of crisis that humans are able to reinvent themselves by either rising to, or falling, in the face of the challenge

Crucial in the call to action now rising are the voices of those elderly people who remember the evacuation of children from cities during World War II – their memory is essential for in them is a precedent, a recollection, that people can take in strangers for the good of all, and that life as you know it can legitimately be interrupted for an act of conscience.

In many ways, what we are seeing now is a hacking of government politics - the mechanisms of a much-vaunted ‘sharing economy’ put to humanitarian rather than market ends.

People – whether in their accommodation, vehicles, expertise, time or spare belongings – are taking the unused value of their surpluses and investing it towards making good. This is what postcapitalism looks like, and here we see are seeing the network technologies of the twenty-first century mobilised to ameliorate the sort of crisis not seen since the twentieth.

Governments can be embarrassed, either by other governments' positions (read: Germany) or when their own populations demand more of them, either vocally, or by outdoing the efforts of the government itself; creating such a clamour that you break the machinery of government, the emotional armour, and break through to the humans that wear it. The Greek bailout crowdfunder, which so cheerfully managed to raise under 1% of only one debt instalment, illustrates that the efforts of networked individuals cannot match the smallest clout of a government. We should let this refugee crisis show that, whilst groundswell cannot replace government, it can and must help shape it.

In Peru, the IFC put up $23 million to build Yanacocha beginning in 1993, and then financed an expansion six years later. The IFC also holds a 5 percent ownership stake in the mine. (Newmont is the majority owner, with a 51 percent stake. Buenaventura, a Peruvian partner, owns the remaining shares.)

“The gold they take out of our region is stained with blood,” said Milton Sánchez, a leader of the protest movement. “Foreigners wear it on their ears, neck and fingers to look good, but their vanity is at the expense of our suffering. We’ve seen destruction of the culture and environment. Our families are being torn apart.”

Newmont, based in Denver, first identified a rich, untapped vein of ore deposits in the hills above the town in 1986. Raising money to finance a mine proved a challenge. Shining Path, a violent insurgent group, had traumatized the country. Foreign banks and companies were reluctant to invest in Peru. Newmont turned to the IFC, which specializes in lending in places where other banks are afraid to go. In the early 1990s, Yanacocha agents traveled deep into the Andes, buying up property. Many sellers, poor and illiterate, say they did not realize that there was huge wealth locked in the rock under their fields. Others claim their neighbors illegally sold land out from under them.

Throughout this period, Yanacocha downplayed the risks of the mercury spill and water pollution. But behind the scenes, executives at its parent, Newmont, worried about the stream of negative publicity surrounding one of their biggest investments. Larry Kurlander, a Newmont senior vice president, was dispatched after the mercury spill to audit the mine. What he found alarmed him. The farmers were right to worry, Kurlander discovered, according to documents obtained as part of a 2005 Frontline and New York Times investigation. He warned senior Newmont officials that the company had violated environmental regulations on a huge scale, and that the abuses he discovered were so bad that senior management was at risk of “criminal prosecution or imprisonment.” “We are in non-compliance with our operating permits … and that non-compliance occurs virtually 100% of the time,” he wrote. Kurlander, who is retired, did not respond to phone messages left at his home.

The shootings made international news, and in Peru they were greeted with widespread condemnation. In the aftermath, Newmont suspended the Conga project indefinitely. Later that year, the company took the unusual step of issuing a formal apology for past actions. “We are not proud of the current state of our relationship with the people of Cajamarca,” company executives wrote in December 2012. “We want to take the opportunity to acknowledge the mistakes we have made in how we conducted ourselves and conducted business.”

According to Sherwood Ross, one reason is that amongst 28 countries ‘that held prisoners in behalf of the US based on published data’, are a dozen from Africa: Algeria, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Gambia, Kenya, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Somalia, South Africa and Zambia. [9] In Gambia, for example, President Yahya Jammeh’s acquiescence to the CIA’s need for a rendition site for US torture victims may explain Obama’s blind eye towards his dictatorship.

And in January 2013, Pretoria deployed 400 troops to the Central African Republic during a coup attempt because, ‘We have assets there that need protection,’ according to deputy foreign minister Ebrahim Ebrahim, referring to minerals (according to his interviewer) [14] or to sophisticated weaponry that South Africa gifted the tyrant ruler there, François Bozizé (according to his reply in a debate with me in late February).

By mid-2012, Pretoria’s National Development Plan – overseen from within the SA Presidency and endorsed at the ANC’s December 2012 national conference – provided a variety of mandated changes in policy so as to align with South Africa’s new BRICS identity and functions. These mainly involved pro-business statements for deeper regional economic penetration, alongside the exhortation to change ‘the perception of the country as a regional bully, and that South African policy-makers tend to have a weak grasp of African geopolitics.’ [17] That problem will haunt Pretoria in coming years because, like the political carving of Africa in Berlin in 1884-85, the BRICS 2013 Durban summit has as its aim the continent’s economic carve-up, unburdened – now as then – by what would be derided as ‘Western’ concerns about democracy and human rights. Also invited were 16 African heads of state to serve as collaborators.

This notion, derived from Rosa Luxemburg’s thinking a century ago, focuses on how capitalism’s extra-economic coercive capacities loot mutual aid systems and commons facilities, families (women especially), the land, all forms of nature, and the shrinking state; Harvey’s accumulation by dispossession, and in special cases requiring militarist intervention, Naomi Klein’s ‘Shock Doctrine’. [22]

The forms of BRICS sub-imperialism are diverse, for as Yeros and Moyo remark, ‘Some are driven by private blocs of capital with strong state support (Brazil, India); others, like China, include the direct participation of state-owned enterprises; while in the case of South Africa, it is increasingly difficult to speak of an autonomous domestic bourgeoisie, given the extreme degree of de-nationalisation of its economy in the post-apartheid period. The degree of participation in the Western military project is also different from one case to the next although, one might say, there is a ‘schizophrenia’ to all this, typical of sub-imperialism.’ [23]

the more that specific companies targeted by victims require unified campaigning and boycotts to generate solidaristic counter-pressure, whether Brazil’s Vale and Petrobras, or South Africa’s Anglo or BHP Billiton (albeit with London and Melbourne headquarters), or India’s Tata or Arcelor-Mittal, or Chinese state-owned firms and Russian energy corporations. In this context, building a bottom-up counter-hegemonic network and then movement against both imperialism and BRICS sub-imperialism has never been more important. [24]

The end game for Chevron may not be winning the lawsuit in Ecuador, but avoiding paying damages if it does lose.

Long ago, U.S. courts decided in Hildton v. Guyot that judgments in foreign courts would not be enforceable if there was “prejudice in the court, or in the system of laws under which it was sitting, or fraud in procuring the judgment.” With the precedence set by the arbitration decision, Ecuador is now in a tough position to prove that its courts meet the highest standards.

By 2010 a second court case had raised the number of Mayan villages with collective ownership of their land to 24. The Belizean government had been barred from granting exploration or extraction licences to these territories without the 'free, prior, and informed consent' of the villagers. Until the government realized these property rights through providing the official title (which is on hold while the government appeals the ruling), the government is barred from “issuing any concessions for resource exploitation, including concessions, permits or contracts authorizing logging, prospecting or exploration.”

The wave of community referenda across Guatemala has involved over 700,000 people, and has occurred in the wake of widespread opposition to Guatemala's controversial Marlin gold mine. The ILO ordered operations at the mine to be suspended, and while Marlin's contamination of the local environment is hotly contested by its Canadian operator Goldcorp, a Tufts University study found a 400 percent increase of arsenic in the area’s groundwater between 2006 and 2009.

Goldcorp recently signed an agreement for a very different type of extraction operation with the Wemindji Cree of northern Quebec, to mine gold and silver at the Éléonore site in the James Bay region. According to Goldcorp's Brent Bergeron (in a Forbes.com article), this is a participatory model that the company seeks to export to their other operations: “We’ve actually had the Cree come down and visit our mine in Guatemala and go out and speak to the local communities”.

This power is reinforced, Scott says, by “a political history in which they have managed to block major unwanted industrial development projects, at great economic and political cost to their proponents. Hence, the Eleonore project is not a very good test of a ‘new approach’ by industry, at least not one adopted on a voluntary basis. External interests have learned, when working on the territory of the Crees, that it can be less costly to get their consent first.”

Umberto Velasquez volunteers in the same committee as Lopez, and critiques what he sees as the manipulations that the company's social investments create: “They come in with their little projects, the company takes photos which they use internationally to boost their image and suggest they have the support of the community.”

Bamaca remembered how - before the company admitted to being a mining operation, when “people didn't know what contamination was” - the company would hold “parties and celebrations in the community, giving sweets to children and beer to adults, knowing this is the local community way. They came in smooth.”

After peace was restored, former elements of a powerful security apparatus geared to domestic repression through massacres, assassinations and rape continued to operate unofficially, becoming known as the ‘hidden powers’. Mayan Nobel Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu rues a missed opportunity for the country: “We should have taken extraordinary measures - as indicated by the peace accords - in the socio-economic sphere to benefit the population, showing that people would have a better life in peace than in war. The conflict had its causes in inequality, in dictatorship. These root causes were not attacked. The root causes are still valid.” 

On 5 February this year, two months after the Q'eqchi' exchange, the village of Conejo gathered to discuss their response to the oil company’s incursion into their territory. The meeting was held in their village community centre, into which entered Manuel Choco, a former activist in Belize's 'Maya Movement' and now permitting officer of the oil company. Two activists of the local indigenous organisation SATIIM (Sarstoon Temash Institute for Indigenous Management) turned on the voice recorders on their mobile phones.

This was the subject of the meeting into which Martin Choco entered and produced a letter, telling the villagers to sign it and get their jobs back. The letter gave US Capital Energy unlimited access to operate seismic lines on Conejo's territory, condemned the leadership for exceeding their authority in sending their original letter of objection, and made no mention of company compensation for the cutting of the illegal lines. Acting on legal advice, the leadership suspended the meeting while Choco continued to collect signatures. Choco's superior is US Capital Energy's representative in Belize, Alistair King, and two days later he said that the letter was written by the villagers themselves and “nothing to do” with the company. Although it lacked the signatures of a majority of Conejo's adult population, he maintained that it granted his company sufficient authority to return to operate the lines that week.

While Alistair King was announcing the return of the company to Conejo's land, and praising the value of having someone like Choco with the company, “who speaks the language”, Conejo's current chairperson Enriqué Makin was walking between the thatched houses scattered through the rainforest. He held a letter, which read: “We did not give US Capital Energy our free, prior and informed consent to conduct seismic testing on our traditional lands affirmed by the Supreme Court of Justice of Belize on [sic] October 2007.” It was signed by the majority of Conejo’s adult population, prompting a showdown meeting between Belize's Department of Geology and Petroleum, the village elders of Conejo, the chairperson and Alcalde, and Martin Choco. The company was ordered to cease operating on Conejo's land and to remove the tags placed along the seismic lines marking the drilling holes for the burial of explosives.

The value of free, prior and informed consent lies in its ability to ensure that the options facing indigenous communities are decided collectively, allowing a degree of meaningful deliberation in lieu of the official, political self-determination that they are generally lacking.