Nicaragua: Cocibolca + cyanide = Ecocide
ByAnti-Capitalist Alternative
He 8 October, Fundación del Río denounced the possible spill in Lake Cocibolca of 10 a 25 quintals of cyanide, that is to say 2200 Y 5500 pounds of this chemical compound. What could constitutea new ecocide, now within the largest freshwater reserve in Nicaragua, also affecting the population that drinks its waters. Especially the communities of San Carlos in the vicinity of the shipwreck.
And contaminate, it's not progress.
The news of the shipwreck of the cyanide-laden vessel was known on 5 October, It was the National Army that gave the report: "The 4 October 2020,… they searched, rescue and rescue 1 smaller boat with 3 crew on board, who were shipwrecked due to bad weather in Lake Cocibolca, a 4 nautical miles northwest of the captaincy of the Port of the Municipality of San Carlos”. to get an idea, those 4 nautical miles are equivalent to a little more than 7 kilometers, Nothing!. According to the Army, They only managed to rescue Captain Dioniso Alvarez alive., and then it was known that “Yabran Francisco Aburto Diaz was found dead, while Juan López Baéz is still missing.”
As the River Foundation denounces, The Army has deliberately not reported on the dangerous contents that the vessel was illegally transporting, "and it does not indicate the widely known smuggling route in the municipality of San Carlos". The Foundation gives us a clue about the destination of the damaged cargo, indicate that since 2016 until 2019 have “documented more than 100 gold extraction mills located mainly in the municipalities of San Carlos, The Castle, New Guinea, Bluefields and within the Indio Maíz Biological Reserve.»
Nothing more is needed to draw conclusions., behind this crime against nature and the population surrounding Lake Cocibolca, in addition to Dioniso Alvarez, the interests of mining companies such as the Canadian B2Gold meet (who outsource in the area with artisanal miners) and the National Army that acts as state guarantor of these extractive activities, predatory and polluting. Cyanide compounds are transversal for the extractive industry of metals such as gold. It is worth mentioning that cyanide at different levels of exposure, It is harmful to health and can be fatal.. We cannot continue allowing private interests to put our health and nature at risk..
Does the exit? To the left! which?
Marx in The German Ideology states that “in a certain development of the productive forces, "A stage is reached in which, within the framework of existing relationships, they become destructive forces.". This approach that Marx did not develop, is fully valid. Especially if we see the “forest” fires in biological reserves., the predation of flora and fauna, the extractive economy throughout Latin America and the global south, and now chemical spills in the precious lake, They show the incompatibility of capitalism with the majority of people.
It is also true that the socio-environmental impacts of capitalist society, are contemporary data, relatively new on the agenda; The enormous mobilizations around the world are no coincidence, as were the “Fridays for future”, led by Greta Thunberg, or the #SOSIndioMaiz protests that underpinned the days of struggle in 2018 In Nicaragua. Given this, the bourgeoisie, the ruling class, offers makeup outings, like the Paris Agreement.
But, Let's discuss some positions on the left spectrum. In this political field on the socio-environmental, there is confusion, and a lot of reformism. The sectors that claim progressivism in general propose a fairly typical reformist scheme. They propose that semicolonial countries (or in “development paths”) like ours in Latin America, They have to go through “the stages” that countries with high capitalist development went through.. Stage the dream paradigm, like the one proposed by Borón, or García Linera, only that this stage lasts an indeterminate amount of time, tremendous problem considering the deepening of the global environmental crisis. Characters like these explain that the task of “national-imperialist liberation” involves sharing income with the mining industries., agro-export latifundia, large real estate developers, even versions - in the best of cases- “mixed economy”. Do you remember her?
Another example of this is the Green New Deal. (after the crisis of 1930, Roosevelt promoted the New Deal, a series of reforms to save the economy, today they only paint it green). This Green New Deal is promoted by sectors such as Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez of the DSA in the Democratic Party, and even the Spanish “socialist” Pedro Sanchez. They talk about reducing greenhouse gases, “decarbonize” the productive system, while paying better salaries, and health and education are improved. All yours!, but how? With some “tax incentives” to those corporations that begin the transition. In other words, pay the same transnationals that have us practically at the point of no return of an environmental catastrophe, without even questioning the role they play in the policies that support their mode of production (like fracking supported by both Republicans and Democrats). Green Capitalism.
There are other sectors of the socialist left, like the Argentine Workers' Party, a national-Trotskyist and dogmatic party, that give a productivist response, leaving the environmental issue in a second or third plane. “A solution” only crossed by the class. This is how they propose workers' control over megamining, the fracking, agribusiness, etc… Revolutionary creativity: Zero!
Our proposal: Ecosocialismo
for us, to find a solution that provides a comprehensive response to the socio-environmental problem, can't stay in the middle, is anachronistic being. Our perspective is concrete: ¡And contaminate, acting in opposition to the best of the Russian and Leninist tradition that was at the forefront in granting the Ukrainian people their right to self-determination, prey: IT IS NOT PROGRESS!
Faced with a system that produces exchange values, that is to say, things to sell; we propose the production of use values, that is to say, socially necessary things. The question then arises: Who says it's socially useful?? Most. The working class and the people, in a broad deliberative process on the political, economic and socio-environmental. This is how we take away from the market the decision about what and how to produce., and therefore consume. Then it's time to take, in the hands of the majority, the main springs/motors of the current economy. And in the face of the functional “blue and white” election strategy to only remove Ortega and Murillo, we oppose the slogan ofFree Constituent Assembly, Sovereign, Democratic and Plurinational.
In discussions with the Movement for the Decolonization of Moskitia, MODEM, They made us see the prevailing need to name not only“the land for those who work it”, if not also“for those who care for it and inhabit it ancestrally” “with a bioethical approach”, which from Alternativa Anticapitalista, we fully assume. That is why our socialist strategy is based on equal rights for all with a transversal and non-negotiable variable.: protection, preservation of the environment and that “natural resources” are considered subjects of law, as well as MODEM demand.
…in our words: ecological socialism, Ecosocialism!
This inexorably implies questioning the privileges of the economic minority in Nicaragua and Central America.. Pass byban polluting industries, extractivists, and predatory, like mining, agribusiness-agrotoxics, industrial livestock, anarchic cementation/urbanization, even consumer advertising.
Given this, another question remains, What happens to the working sectors of these industries?? Job reconversion, and don't let it stay there, it is necessary to guaranteefull employment by distributing working hours, which as a consequence would mean thereduction of working hours, relying on new technologies to also guaranteeequal and better salaries. That is our horizon, our strategic hypothesis. Thus moving forward to reduce the volume of what is produced in capitalist logic. Ensure sufficient food, healthy and accessible. Replace the capitalist advertising business with the social right to free and plural information. Energy system based on clean and renewable energy. Public and state transportation system with social control of its workers and users, in order to discourage the individual use of automobiles. Guarantee the long-delayed regional autonomy. And internationalist cooperation between peoples, not with its transstate institutions like SICA, OAS, HIM.
Those are some lines to think about a vision (for nothing utopian), for the construction of an ecosocialist and anticapitalist political program, nothing to do with those electoral vehicles like the National Coalition and its components. Vehicles that are being used by Ortega members: opportunistic businessmen and politicians. We face that challenge, a challenge where youth, indigenous peoples and expressions defending environmental rights are the vanguard of this fight. This is part of our contribution to the construction of an Anticapitalist Alternative, to dispute real power- for the social majority. Let's build this perspective together.
