Arresting climate and environmental activists is so widespread that it’s almost become routine – applauded, even, as governments and corporations label those who block roads, disrupt shareholder meetings and throw confetti at tennis matches as radical lawbreakers. But jailing ordinary people trying to stop the destruction of the planet – while the industries responsible keep profiteering and elected officials keep letting them – isn’t normal or accidental.
To understand what’s going on today, I recently travelled back to San Miguel Ixtahuacán, a rural community in the western highlands of Guatemala, where 15 years ago Indigenous-led opposition to a sprawling Canadian gold and silver mine became one of the earliest documented cases of a transnational corporation – and its state allies – weaponising the legal system against environmental defenders.
Patrocinia Mejía, a 63-year-old grandmother, was among scores of community members slapped with arbitrary criminal charges, which divided and crippled the social movement. “We were so scared of being captured that we didn’t hold our meetings any more, and I was too afraid to show my face at protests,” Mejía (pictured above) told me. Even today, six years since the mine was closed, the divisions and collective trauma were gut-wrenching to see.
Experts told me that what happened in San Miguel Ixtahuacán proved to be so effective that criminalisation spread across Latin America and is now deployed globally as part of a playbook of tactics to divide communities, and detract attention away from legitimate debate and protests about environmental and climate harms. Guatemala was a textbook example of a draconian crackdown and became a laboratory of sorts, said Jorge Santos, the director of Udefegua, a Guatemala-based rights group tracking attacks on defenders.
It’s worth noting that criminalisation is among a gamut of repressive tools being used against climate and environmental activists, which also includes online attacks, financial sanctions and even kidnap and assassinations. Yet criminalisation stands out as it exposes the barefaced nexus between corporations and governments. Corporations can hire private security thugs to intimidate and attack grassroots leaders, but they cannot arrest and charge them without their political and law enforcement allies.
Take the case of Mylene Vialard, a French translator from Colorado, who faces up to five years in jail for her role in trying to stop the expansion of Line 3, a tar sands oil pipeline with a dire environmental record. Minnesota law enforcement – which along with other agencies reportedly received at least $8.6m in payments from the Canadian pipeline company Enbridge – made more than 1,000 arrests between December 2020 and September 2021. Overall, at least 967 criminal charges were filed including several people charged under the state’s new critical infrastructure protection legislation – approved as part of a wave of anti-protest laws inspired by the American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), an ultra-right US group backed by fossil fuel companies. (Similar laws are spreading across the world). Yet the vast majority of charges were dismissed, suggesting the mass arrests were about silencing and distracting protesters – not public safety or national security as was claimed at the time, according to Claire Glenn, an attorney at the Climate Defense Project who has represented more than 100 Line 3 protesters.
Over the next few months, we’ll be reporting on the criminalisation of climate and environmental activists globally; connecting the dots between these seemingly disparate cases is key to exposing who and what is behind the crackdown.
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