Argentina: enough of terricide!
This guest blog is part of a series intended as a dedicated space for the many global movements/campaigns around the globe confronting ecosystem destruction to share their stories, narratives and perspectives.
Image: “Basta de Terricidio” 2021
This post has been written by the ‘Movimiento de Mujeres y Diversidades Indígenas por el Buen Vivir’ (Women's Movement and Indigenous Diversities for Good Living) with the special collaboration of one of its members, Paula Mercedes Alvarado Mamani, lawyer and coordinator of the Terricide Bill. She belongs to the Kolla Indigenous People, is a member of the Tres Ombúes de la Matanza Community and of the Assembly for the Articulation of the Peoples of Qollasuyu. She is also a member of the indigenous women's community SISA PACHA of the alternative media outlet Las Sisas
The Movimiento de Mujeres y Diversidades Indígenas por el Buen Vivir defines "TERRICIDE" as the killing, not only of tangible ecosystems and the people who inhabit them, but also of all the forces that regulate life on earth - what we call the perceptible ecosystem.
History of the Movimiento de Mujeres y Diversidades Indígenas por el Buen Vivir (Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Good Living)
In 2013, a few of us sisters began to travel around the country with the idea of creating what is today the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Good Living. We went on a mission to make visible what they try to make invisible: our body-territory, our cosmovisions, our identities and our rights as women and indigenous diversities. All of these driving forces led us on a journey that brought together and generated the support of women from 36 of the 40 pre-existing nations which cohabit the Argentinian territory. Together, we organised ourselves in the space that we called the March of Indigenous Women for Good Living and which, in mid-2018, we renamed the Movement of Indigenous Women for Good Living, and again in May 2022, renamed the Movement of Indigenous Women and Diversities for Good Living.
We are a movement set up to amplify rights. We recognise ourselves as a movement of struggle insofar as we claim territory and we believe that movements of struggle must multiply.
We do not accept ideological tutelage, and we politically declare ourselves on the basis of our ancestral identity and our cosmogonies, knowledge and territorial identities. We are a fighting movement.
We aim to recover the historic plurinationality that has been ignored and denied by the official history. We fight for self-determination of our bodies, our territories and our peoples.
We are confident in our strength as women of the earth. Our ancestry gives us power and wisdom; our love for life calls us to struggle. The time is today and unity cannot be postponed.
Context
It is necessary to establish what is meant by Lands and Territories for Indigenous Peoples and Communities. It has been stated that: "Indigenous territory is NOT the sum of the resources it contains that are susceptible to appropriation or economic relations. Its nature is based on the integration of physical and spiritual elements that link a space of nature to a particular people".
In this way, it is worth highlighting the transcendence of Territory in relation to the identity and culture of the Original Peoples. Territory is the habitat, the space in which the Peoples develop their political, social, economic, cultural and spiritual life and satisfy their most varied needs. The right to Territory is a natural right inherent to Indigenous Peoples.
At the same time, Indigenous Peoples do not consider themselves in any way "owners" of the lands they occupy. On the contrary, they are part of Nature. They worship Pacha Mama or Mother Earth. Mother Earth has rights, and so she is a subject of rights and not an object to be appropriated. The indigenous people's relationship with Territory is not an economic relationship, nor is it a relationship of appropriation. It is a spiritual, cultural and identity relationship.
So what is Terricide?
Terricide is the destruction of both the TANGIBLE ECOSYSTEM and the SPIRITUAL ECOSYSTEM. It is a term that intertwines historical and present oppressions:
TERRICIDE is also the attempt to destroy our spiritualities, through the invasion of our communities by churches financed by those transnationals, who, taking advantage of the impoverishment and inability to access other means, provide some educational, welfare or musical services, and inoculate reactionary, sexist, verticalist, discriminatory and racist ideologies, leading to estrangement from one's own history and identity. We say that Terricide is also:
INDIGENOUS GENOCIDE - the systematic extermination of a social group, motivated by race, religion, ethnicity, politics or nationality. It is a mass murder that seeks to eliminate the group and may even include measures to prevent births. It has never ceased, because the systematic extermination of indigenous peoples has never ceased. Only the methods have changed: today they kill us with hunger, malnutrition, racist violence, repression, water pollution, poisoning with toxic agro-chemicals and state neglect.
ECOCIDE means the destruction of nature, which is our home: mountains, forests, hills, wetlands, rivers, lakes, glaciers, mountains. It is everything that agribusiness, mining and extractivist companies are doing all over the country, and as a result of which, in the face of our attempts to stop them, we are subjected to all the cruelty of the repressive apparatus of the State, which acts as the guardian of these companies, with its army, police, gendarmerie and judicial system.
FEMICIDE not only encompasses the macho violence found in a patriarchal society, but also institutionalised racial violence, that is to say, it is a form of extermination elaborated, devised and developed under the protection and impunity of the State. The damage to women's lives is systematised; we indigenous women have been suffering racism, colonial violence, discrimination and xenophobia, misogyny, chineo*, the death of our children and economic impoverishment due to the loss of land.
CULTURICIDE is the destruction of our ways of life, the transmission of knowledge, medicine, ways of feeding ourselves, our deities and beliefs, and our artistic manifestations. From the conquest until now, there has only been contempt, disqualification, mockery and humiliation of our practices, and the permanent destruction of our sacred places and sources of life.
EPISTEMICIDE -the elimination, obstruction, cancellation of all our ways of knowing and understanding the world, life and its processes. So-called scientific knowledge is recognised as the only form of knowledge, and it is the form in which colonialist Europe has decided to interpret an enormous and rich world and which it has imposed on Abya Yala and Africa. And in all educational systems and in the generality of life, this form is imposed as the only valid and legitimate one, leaving our knowledge in a place of superstition, mythical or magical beliefs, as ways of despising and disregarding them. We reclaim magic, myths, and all ancestral, spiritual and empirical ways of understanding, interpreting and improving life.
TRANSFEMICIDE and TRANSVESTICIDE - the organised, continuous and targeted murder of our body-territory on a daily basis. The violence of the patriarchal system is integral. The context of violation and elimination of dissident bodies, as well as women's bodies, is constructed with perverse subtleties, from underhand segregationism to institutional negligence that assumes that certain bodies are violable and murderable, and that some lives are worth more than others. Within this policy, there is a proliferation of radicalised religious sectors that construct discourses of hatred, what we call religious violence against gender. In this way, they create the conditions for the crimes of femicide, transvesticide and transfemicide.
For all these reasons, in March 2021 we held the 'Enough of Terricide' walk, under the slogan “As long as we do not have justice, there will be no peace for them”. As indigenous women from various plurinational territories severely affected by the Terricide, we walk together with all those people who, like us, feel indignant, powerless, and who do not want to be mere spectators to the tragedy, nor silent accomplices to the destruction of life. We propose to make visible, to claim and to demand: Enough of Terricide!
We demand that Terricide be considered a crime against nature and humanity, that the Terricide murderers be tried and condemned. Up to now, all attacks against the life of our mother earth have gone unpunished. The indolence of governments feeds the greed, the lethal greed of extractivism.
It is for this reason that we arrived in the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires on 22 May 2021, the 211th anniversary of the first cry for independence of the Argentine Republic. We remember that, on that date, the State began to constitute itself as an invasion force in the indigenous territories.
As heirs of those original nations that were invaded, plundered, murdered and enslaved, we make an urgent call to act from the spirit of the mapu, pacha, land, to combat Terricide. The State must account for what it has done with our territories; how does it intend to repair all the damage that it has caused?
Image: 2º Parlamento de Mujeres Indígenas por el Buen Vivir, en las Grutas, Río Negro (julio 2019)
Conclusion
This plurinationality that inhabits the confines of all the territories which are today called Argentina must unite in clamour for life, building together with the Argentinian people and the peoples of the world a new, civilising matrix. The colonial republics have taken Terricide to its maximum expression of pain and death.
There will be those who say: "Indigenous comrades, the conditions are not right for us to go out and fight". To which we reply: “the conditions for living are not present, that is why we go out to fight. Our medicine women, our spiritual authorities and many of us are receiving truths, revealed to us through dreams, about events that are going to occur.
As bearers of these visions, we commit ourselves to be guardians of life. There is no excuse; the time is now. We will not be walking alone. The spirit of the earth and the spirits of our ancestors will walk with us. We are determined to offer our strength, our wisdom, our spirit and our walk to put an end, once and for all, to so much death. We shout to the world: "As long as we do not have justice, there will be no peace for them".
Note: Chineo is a colonialist crime that persists in several provinces of Argentina where white men gang rape women of indigenous peoples, including minors.