The eyes of the world are on Temacapulin. So declared an anti-dam banner wrapped around a gazebo alongside others naming the Mekong River and the Naradama Valley. Solidarity is probably the single best hope for the 500 residents of this sleepy Mexican town on the brink of being submerged.
It’s a battle of David and Goliath proportions. Father Gabriel, the local priest, tweaked the final words of the Lord’s Prayer, urging, “Lead us not into temptation and deliver us from dams. Amen”.
This was Rivers for Life 3, a global gathering of the international movement of dam critics and river protectors. I attended as a stringer for American Jewish World Service, which had the wisdom to support this effort. They helped fly in representatives from dam-affected communities to participate, from the Thai-Burmese border, from Kenya, from all over the world.
On the fourth day, hundreds of people – townsfolk and national and international activists – marched down hot and dusty switchbacks, past bulldozers, deeper and deeper into a narrowing canyon to the place where the river is to be held back by a mammoth cement wall, a dam called El Zapotillo.
In spite of the rousing chants – “El pueblo unido jamas sera vencido (the people united will never be defeated)”, and vigorously waved flags and banners from some of the 62 countries represented at the forum – I imagine others shared a pit in the stomach when we came upon massive chutes that will channel water into hydroelectric turbines. Even the model homes for a relocation village are already partially built. Can defense of the commons prevail in the face of this giant investment?
Everyone agreed with Father Gabriel that the march to the dam must be non-violent. Yet some seemed unable to stop themselves from giving a swift kick to a construction cone. The previous day, frustrated and increasingly desperate leaders nearly succeeded in getting forum participants to put aside the agenda and occupy the site. “I just wish that instead of ignoring us, the politicians and water commission would come here and tell us to our face: You know why we can do this to you? Because you’re stinking peasants and you’re not worth shit.” “Get out of your hammocks,” town leaders exhorted their less active neighbors. “The time is now.” “Shhhh,” whispered a light-skinned woman in a beehive hairdo who I can only guess wasn’t an activist until the dam loomed. “We know there are spies here.” “Let them hear us!!” others answered. “Let them see that we won’t stop until they stop building the dam.” A lawyer from Amnesty International gathered testimony to build an international human rights case. Father Gabriel said, “We may be a small town, but our dignity is great.”
Putting aside a spontaneous march for more deliberate action, the community sat together for an entire day to ensure that any action taken might be part of a longer-term strategy. This day’s symbolic act was meant as a healing caress to the scarred canyon walls and strangled river, “to heal it where it’s most hurt”, as well as to buoy the energy and commitment of those townspeople – the ones who will have to struggle on long after the solidarity activists return to their countries.
Temacapulin’s cobble-stone streets are lined with whitewashed adobe houses, a stunning rose-rock18th century church, and neighbors chatting from their stoops and doorways. You can’t help but take a deep breath and let time and worries go – even though that peacefulness is splintered by the sound of earth-moving machinery. Christ’s image is etched into a cliff (sadly I couldn’t make it out, which apparently is an unlucky portent) and more than 20 hot springs percolate up from the hallowed earth.
Despite its beauty, Temacapulin has not been immune to the bleeding of Mexico’s countryside. Among the mostly farming families, wrongheaded national and international agriculture and trade policies have fed a wave of migration to the US and Guadalajara. Many at the gathering would describe these as intentional expulsion policies – with no humans around to protest, it’s easier for the government and transnational firms to pillage and appropriate the natural abundance. At one point in the meeting, a town resident stood and asked rhetorically, “Why don’t they provide us with the tools, credit and agronomists we need to work our land and live well instead of flooding us out?” Temacapulin’s demography now spikes toward the elderly, many of whom couldn’t participate in the march to the dam site. Youth, however, have resurfaced in a spirited diaspora network of “absent sons and daughters”. They have been summoned to come home and fight. Their list of allies is long.
Over 47,000 large dams around the world have displaced over 40,000,000 people. The World Bank has invested over $60 billion in 600 dams. The environmental movement has put a brake on large dams in the US (in fact is succeeding in dismantling some) but hasn’t shown a similar ability to diminish the US appetite for energy. Many Mexican hydroelectric dams principal purpose is to export energy north through inter-connected grids to air conditioned cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas. In one of miracles of NAFTA, Mexican electricity is welcome even as the US militarizes a border fence.
I had the pleasure of exploring Temacapulin’s nooks with one of the town’s characters. At 77, Don Poncho is nothing short of a goat, scampering up a hillside with a gaggle of us panting behind, to the tomb of his great grandmother in a Juarez-era cemetery. In his cornfield, he machetied back brush to uncover a boulder carved with pre-Hispanic spirals. In the shadows of cliffs, among giant ferns and cactus, a waterfall spitting, we counted over 40 species of butterflies. Reflecting on the visit to the dam at an evening meeting, Don Poncho’s voice trembled, “I’ll defend this valley, my cornfield, my ancestors. The only thing I have to lose is my life. Nothing more.”
At that meeting, debate was sharp on how to get this mega-project permanently shelved. Many proposed persevering on the legal front – within a terribly compromised legal system. Thus far, a judge’s order to suspend work has been ignored. A Mexican university professor, Octavio Rosa Landis, lamented how successful Mexico’s PR machine has been. Internationally, the image of a budding Mexican democracy remains robust despite the tens of thousands of assassinations and detentions ascribed to the drug war. In fact the offensive against the narcos is painted as a defense of Mexican democracy. Pouring billions into this militarization and touting the virtues of free trade with its neighbor, the US has considerable self-interest in portraying Mexico as a success story. We hear less about how the drug war serves as a cover for government-sponsored thugs to knock off anyone they don’t like. Booting the PRI party from 70 years of presidential power in 2000 was supposed to change things, but then in 2006 the right-wing PAN party couldn’t resist and also committed electoral fraud. With poverty, human rights abuses and pillage of the commons on the rise, political opposition is considerable and repression is fierce.
Nevertheless, activists who stood upon cranes and excavators at the dam site were happy to hear a federal congressional representative promise to push his colleagues to enforce the construction suspension court order. With Father Gabriel controlling the megaphone – and an angry crowd – people swarmed around a construction supervisor and pressed him to cough up the names of his supervisors. Under questioning, he admitted he’d be doing what they were doing if his village was about to be flooded. But still, he couldn’t remember his superiors’ names. He sweated under his hard hat when half a dozen people taunted, “estas chingando la nacion (you’re fucking the nation).” In a tense moment, the crowd was drawn to boulders tumbling down from the canyon’s edge, apparently from a work camp above. Father Gabriel asked for calm and reiterated non-violent intentions. Intentional or not, these landslides are a considerable threat. In one large dam in China, boulders plunging down a denuded rock face produced a giant wave that forced the evacuation of 70,000 people downstream.
Going forward, Temacapulin residents hope to set up a watchdog camp to monitor the construction. Citizen groups in Leon and Guanajuato will advocate with their officials not to buy water coming from this dam. International friends will help pressure development banks to withdraw financing.
Sounds bleak, eh? Not so! The only pall to the gathering was morning fog that burned off by ten. On two evenings, the town square boomed with world music, and I don’t mean the sanitized Paul Simon stuff. The Africans had the whole town spinning and bouncing, the Tajiks and Chinese sang songs that sounded plaintive but were apparently happy and South Asians moved their necks in cobra-like dance. When the MC tried to wind things down around midnight, a knot of local teenage girls chanted, “We’re not tired, we’re not tired.” I wasn’t the only one to take a late night soak in the hot springs. The town was transformed for the week. The 500 or so delegates slept in people’s homes, most adorned with signs that said, “not for sale, we’re not moving”. A sense of genuine solidarity, based on the beginnings of friendship, was born.
Sessions were held under tents in the town’s public spaces – the church plaza, the soccer field, the school, a dead end street. Some workshops described the environmental ravages of dams, their poor efficiency and their contribution to climate change. Many more explored organizing tactics such as local and national referendums, connecting upstream and downstream communities in watershed councils and promoting alternative sources of energy. An Australian group formed to save the Mary River described how they had legally mandated citizen oversight of new sustainable water management practices, practices which included discarding a proposed dam. An economist from Mozambique described his organization’s research, which proved that Mozambique didn’t need a proposed dam. Between tightening up inefficiencies in the grid and among heavy consumers, Mozambique would be just fine. Governments and lenders tend to love these capital-intensive boondoggles, symbols of modernization, but decentralized biomass, solar and smaller dams could satisfy Mozambique’s energy and water needs. For making this claim publicly, the organization’s website has been blocked and the speaker has had to take great care in his movements. Burmese, Colombian, Ethiopian, Chinese and Mexican activists have been killed for their environmental and human rights work. Still, these threats haven’t succeeded in holding back a wave of activism to manage water as a commons, safeguarding its health for future generations.
And I haven’t even mentioned the food. An outdoor kitchen had been erected in the church courtyard. Colossal pots of beans bubbled and mountains of local corn boiled. The set up had a Woodstock feel. We washed our dishes in vats of water next to a bicycle-powered blender in front of a compost pile the size of a human grave.
We gathered in church plaza for a final picture, an aerial shot snapped from the roof of the church. Visitors and townspeople crowded around a multicolored sawdust mural the size of a basketball court that read – Rivers for Life, not for Death.
After the picture, Marcos took the megaphone, a raspy, blond Mexican organizer from the Mexican Network Against Dams. He led us in a blessing of the four directions, the sky and then the earth. He asked us try to block out the sound of the bulldozers and listen for the river that they seek to drown. Sounds hokey but when I let my skepticism wash over me and closed my eyes, I swear I could feel a current tugging at my ankles, the rivers from the Catskills to El Salvador to the Sierras, all that water that has carried me along. Even hokier, I swallowed back tears. .
An activist from India got it just right, I think. Cutting through the week’s heady political and economic analysis, he said, simply, “Unless all of us – so connected to water already – can reconnect to that water, we’ll not succeed in managing it sensibly.”
I can drink to that.