In Colombia, a river’s ‘rights’ swept away by mining and conflict


By AFP
November 13, 2024


The plight of Colombia's Atrato river underscores the challenges facing conservationists in conflict-ridden areas 

- Copyright AFP SAUL LOEB

Lina VANEGAS

In 2016, a Colombian court sent a powerful statement on environmental protection by ruling that a crucial river in the northwestern Choco jungle, which was being decimated by illegal mining, had legal rights.

The landmark decision, which came the same year the government inked an historic peace deal with the FARC guerrillas who controlled much of Choco, compelled the state to protect the Atrato river, the lifeblood of the region.

A new dawn seemed possible in Colombia’s poorest, conflict-scarred department, where dozens of children had died from mercury poisoning due to illegal gold mining in the river.

But eight years later, the Atrato is still dotted with illegal dredging barges that churn up the riverbed in search of gold. New armed groups have filled the void left by FARC fighters. Locals still fear health risks from the river’s turbid waters.

The plight of the Atrato underscores the challenges facing conservationists in conflict-ridden areas.

The Atrato snakes 750 kilometers (460 miles) across Choco, from the Andes and through thick jungle to the Caribbean Sea.

In the near absence of paved roads in the region, the river and its tributaries are the main conduits for the transport of people and goods, as well as being a vital source of food.

“It is like an arterial vein… without it, we would not exist,” Claudia Rondan, a 41-year-old environmental activist from the Embera Indigenous community, told AFP.



– River is ‘sick’ –



Rondan is one of 14 leaders from riverside communities who act as “guardians” of the Atrato, helping to ensure compliance with the 2016 court ruling.

But she feels powerless to revive a waterway she describes as “sick.”

Ramon Cartagena, a 59-year-old environmentalist and guardian near the river’s source in El Carmen de Atrato, is equally despairing.

“There is no life at all in the river,” he said.

“Our parents left us … a translucent, clear river, and today we have an obligation to do the same and I think we are failing.”

The Atrato starts at 3,900 meters (12,800 feet) above sea level in the Western Cordillera, the lowest branch of the Colombian Andes.

At the source, the water is crystal clear and fit for drinking.

But by the time it widens out near Choco’s main city of Quibdo, its fast-flowing, murky waters are laced with mercury, a key ingredient in gold mining that has been blamed for the deaths of dozens of children in the past decade.

Colombia is the country worst affected worldwide by mercury pollution, a UN report found in 2018.

In Quibdo, fishmongers complain they can’t find buyers for their catch, because residents fear being poisoned.

Arnold Rincon, director of the local environmental authority, insists that the river’s mercury levels are safe.

But Jose Marrugo, an expert in mercury pollution at the University of Cordoba, in northern Colombia, said some villagers show signs of “chronic poisoning.”



– Look the other way –



As of mid-September 2024, the military has destroyed 334 illegal mining machines in the Atrato river.

But the dredging continues regardless.

On a visit to the region earlier this year, AFP saw several ramshackle mining rafts on the river.

“People are afraid to report it, everyone remains silent,” Bernardino Mosquera, another of Atrato’s guardians, told AFP.

That includes the river’s custodians. They say they have received death threats for combating illegal mining.

Colombia is the most dangerous country in the world for environmental activists, with 361 killed since 2018, the Colombian peace foundation Pares said in a report last month.

The judge who endowed the Atrato with basic rights, Jorge Ivan Palacio, has blamed “a lack of political will” and corruption for the state’s failure to properly implement the ruling.

In a damning indictment, Colombia’s Ombudsman’s Office, which oversees the protection of civil and human rights, said there was “no evidence of any kind of progress towards effective conservation” in the region since 2016.

Environmental delegates gather in Colombia for a conference on dwindling global biodiversity

STEVEN GRATTAN
Sun, October 20, 2024

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) — Global environmental leaders gather Monday in Cali, Colombia to assess the world’s plummeting biodiversity levels and commitments by countries to protect plants, animals and critical habitats.

The two-week United Nations Biodiversity Conference, or COP16, is a follow-up to the 2022 Montreal meetings where 196 countries signed a historic global treaty to protect biodiversity.

The accord includes 23 measures to halt and reverse nature loss, including putting 30% of the planet and 30% of degraded ecosystems under protection by 2030.


“We hope that (COP16) will be an opportunity for countries to get to work and focus on implementation, monitoring and compliance mechanisms that then have to be developed in their countries and in their national plans,” said Laura Rico, campaign director at Avaaz, a global activism nonprofit.

A real threat to biodiversity loss

All evidence shows dramatic decline in species abundance and distribution, said Linda Krueger, director of biodiversity at The Nature Conservancy.

“A lot of wild species have less room to live, and they’re declining in numbers,” Krueger said. “And we also see rising extinction rates. Things that we haven’t even discovered yet are blinking out.”

The world is experiencing its largest loss of life since the dinosaurs, with around 1 million plant and animal species now threatened with extinction, according to the United Nations Environment Programme.

In the Amazon rainforest, threats to biodiversity include the expansion of the agricultural frontier and road networks, deforestation, forest fires and drought, says Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, an organization that protects the rainforest.

“You put all of that together and it’s a real threat to biodiversity,” Miller said.

Global wildlife populations have plunged on average by 73% in 50 years, according to the WWF and the Zoological Society of London biennial Living Planet report this month.

The report said Latin America and the Caribbean saw 95% average declines in recorded wildlife populations.

Indigenous communities key to biodiversity protection

Indigenous people are on the front lines of protecting biodiversity and fighting against climate change, putting their lives at great risk, said Miller of Amazon Watch.

“A lot of discourse has been given about the voices of local communities … Indigenous peoples really playing a key role,” he said. “So that’s one of the things that we’ll be looking for at COP16.”

Indigenous peoples hold the solutions to combat the climate change and biodiversity crises, Rico said.

“They're who have been taking care of the land, healing the land through their governance systems, their care systems and their ways of life,” she said. “So ... it's fundamental that the COP recognizes, promotes and encourages the legalization of their territories.”

In Colombia’s capital, Bogota, the head of an Amazon Indigenous organization said the region's Indigenous people have been preparing for months for COP16.

“This is a great opportunity to make the impact that we need to demonstrate to all the actors that come from other countries the importance of Indigenous peoples for the world,” said José Mendez, secretary of the National Organization of the Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon.

“It's no secret to anyone that we ... are at risk right now,” he said. “The effects that we are currently experiencing due to climate change, the droughts that the country is experiencing, the Amazon River has never gone through a drought like the current one. … This is causing many species to become extinct.”

Nature can recover

Colombia’s environment minister Susana Muhamad, who is presiding over COP16, told local media this month that one of the conference's main objectives is to deliver the message that “biodiversity is as important, complementary and indispensable as the energy transition and decarbonization.”

Part of Colombia's first ever leftist government, Muhamad cautioned last year's World Economic Forum about the risks of continuing an extractive economy that ignores the social and environmental consequences of natural resource exploitation.

Since the 2022 Montreal conference, “progress has been too slow”, says Eva Zabey, executive director of the coalition Business for Nature.

“There's been some progress," she said. “But the headline message is the implementation of the global biodiversity framework is too slow and we need to scale and speed up.”

“COP16 comes at an absolutely critical moment for us to move from targets setting to real actions on the ground,” Zabey said.

Although biodiversity declines are grim, some environmentalists believe a reversal is possible. “We’ve had some very successful species reintroductions and we’ve saved species when we really focus on what is causing their decline,” said The Nature Conservancy's Krueger.

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'The world is a mess' warns renowned zoologist Jane Goodall ahead of Cop16

RFI
Sun, October 20, 2024

British primate expert Jane Goodall wants a coming United Nations summit on biodiversity to lead to action rather than "words and false promises". Seen here at a World Economic Forum in 2020.


As officials from around 200 countries prepare to meet in Colombia for the Cop16 biodiversity summit starting Monday, world-respected British zoologist Jane Goodall said there was little time left to reverse the downward slide. She wants the United Nations meeting to lead to action rather than "words and false promises".

"What keeps me going is that right now, the world is a mess," Goodall told RFI. "I care really passionately about the natural world, the environment, not just the chimpanzees, but all the other animals, but I also care about children. I care about the people around the world who are suffering so much today."

Goodall has been a UN Messenger of Peace since 2002 and has used this platform to raise awareness about the damage done to nature.

At 90, she is still crisscrossing the globe in a bid to help defend the chimpanzee, who she first went to Tanzania to study more than 60 years ago.

"I was given a gift, and when I speak, people listen. And people who are losing hope, I seem to be able to give them more hope, to enable everyone to roll up their sleeves and take action," she told RFI ahead of her talk at Unesco in Paris on Saturday.

Her visit to the French capital comes just two days ahead of the Cop16 biodiversity summit in Cali, Colombia.
Reverse species destruction

Themed "Peace with Nature," it has the urgent task of coming up with monitoring and funding mechanisms to ensure that 23 UN targets agreed in 2022 to halt and reverse species destruction can be met by 2030.

(with AFP)



UN chief seeks 'significant' funding at summit to save nature

Mariëtte Le Roux
Sun, October 20, 2024 

More than a quarter of assessed plant and animal species are threatened with extinction (Raul ARBOLEDA) (Raul ARBOLEDA/AFP/AFP)


UN chief Antonio Guterres on Sunday urged "significant investment" in a fund created to safeguard Earth's biodiversity as he addressed delegates to the world's biggest nature protection conference in Cali, Colombia.

The meeting, which officially opens Monday, had a ceremonial kickoff with Cali on high alert after threats from a guerrilla group.

Guterres made a video address to guests gathered for the event taking place under the protection of thousands of Colombian police and soldiers, aided by UN and US security personnel.

"We must leave Cali with significant investment in the Global Biodiversity Framework Fund (GBFF), and commitments to mobilize other sources of public and private finance," the secretary general said.

The GBFF was created last year to help countries achieve the goals of the so-called Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted in Canada in 2022 with 23 targets to "halt and reverse" the loss of nature by 2030.

So far, countries have made about $250 million in commitments to the fund, according to agencies monitoring progress.

The fund is part of a broader agreement made in Montreal two years ago for countries to mobilize at least $200 billion per year by 2030 for biodiversity, including $20 billion per year by 2025 from rich nations to help the developing world.

Guterres highlighted that destroying nature increases conflict, hunger and disease, fuels poverty and slashes GDP.

"A collapse in nature's services -- such as pollination, and clean water -- would see the global economy lose trillions of dollars a year, with the poorest hardest hit," he said.

Avoiding such a future would entail countries "honoring promises on finance and accelerating support to developing countries," said Guterres.

"Those profiting from nature must contribute to its protection and restoration," he added.

- 'Peace with nature' -

About 12,000 delegates from nearly 200 countries, including 140 government ministers and a dozen heads of state were due to attend the 16th Conference of the Parties (COP16) to the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), running until November 1.

Themed "Peace with Nature," it has the urgent task of coming up with monitoring and funding mechanisms to ensure the 23 UN targets can be met.

But Colombia's EMC rebel group, a splinter of the FARC guerrilla army that disbanded in 2017, has cast a shadow over the event by urging foreign delegations to stay away and warning the conference "will fail."

The threat came after EMC fighters were targeted in a military raid in the southwest Cauca department, where the group is accused of engaging in drug trafficking and illegal mining.

Cali is the nearest big city to territory controlled by the EMC, which has been engaged in fraught peace negotiations with the government.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro also attended Sunday's ceremonial event, two days after saying he was "nervous" about security.

Cali's mayor Alejandro Eder insisted, however, that "we have been working since February to safeguard the city of Cali... We have more than 10,000 police officers, we also have detachments of the Colombian Armed Forces guarding the entire perimeter of the city. We have air protection, protection against drones."

- Time running out -

The delegates have their work cut out for them, with just five years left to achieve the target of placing 30 percent of land and sea areas under protection by 2030.

World-renowned British primate expert Jane Goodall warned ahead of the summit there was little time to reverse the downward slide.

"The time for words and false promises is past if we want to save the planet," Goodall told AFP this week.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which keeps a red list of threatened animals and plants, more than a quarter of assessed species -- about a million altogether -- are threatened with extinction.

Host Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, and Petro has made environmental protection a priority.

But the country has struggled to extricate itself from six decades of armed conflict between leftist guerrillas such as the EMC, right-wing paramilitaries, drug gangs, and the state.

mlr/bjt

Colombia Biodiversity Conference
Colombia's President Gustavo Petro delivers a speech at the opening ceremony of COP16, a United Nations' biodiversity conference, in Cali, Colombia, Sunday, Oct. 20, 2024. 

(AP Photo/Fernando Vergara)

Activist Killings In Colombia, Critical Context For The COP-16

By Daniela Díaz

October 19, 2024
Source: Ojalá


Members of the Indigenous guard from Cauca participate in the inauguration of President Gustavo Petro in Bogotá, Colombia on August 8, 2022. (Photo: Daniela Díaz)

Colombia’s biodiversity is as varied and enormous as the panorama of violence facing those fighting to conserve it. But the Colombian state appears to have forgotten the plight of land defenders, who are facing unprecedented attacks against their organizing.

This was evidenced in the latest report published by Global Witness, which relies on the work of the Colombian organization Somos Defensores. The report casts a shadow on Colombia, which is the most dangerous country in the world to be an environmental leader. Last year 79 environmental activists were killed, 40 percent of the worldwide total.

Since Somos Defensores began to keep a registry in 2012, the number of killings of defenders adds up to over 400. But this is just the tip of the iceberg in regards to structural violence against those who dare to defend the environment and their territory. They not only face threats but also stigmatization and legal persecution.

Repression in Colombia is also related to the high level of social organization, and at least twelve types of organizers can be identified, some more threatened than others. The leadership of Indigenous peoples is the most affected by the killings, followed by community leaders, who tend to be people who represent their municipality, town, neighborhood, or the place where they live. Environmental defenders face the third highest number of aggressions.

The characterization of the Somos Defensores project, which tracks violence against rights defenders in Colombia, also looks at attacks on organizing by victims, human rights activists and defenders of women’s rights, Afro-descendants, youth, LGBTQI+ people and union leaders.
Fighting despite the risks

Pedro Abel Castañeda is one among hundreds of local leaders in Colombia. For at least thirty years, he has been dedicated to protecting the Pisba Paramo in the Boyacá department from mining exploitation on the part of large U.S. multinationals.

“We have constantly organized ourselves to stop the devastating advance of mining that has negatively impacted the water in an entire region,” said Castañeda in an interview with Ojalá. “Our land defense against these large companies has generated a great deal of conflict.”

In 2013, Castañeda, together with other farmers in the area, succeeded in expelling the Hunza Coral mining company, which had opened more than 60 mine shafts in the area in an irregular manner, threatening a water source that supplies two departments. Then came the threats, which dissipated with time, but that reappear periodically.

The most recent intimidation against Castañeda took place last May, when men claiming to be from the National Liberation Army (ELN) guerrilla declared him a “military target” in a telephone call. Although he alerted authorities about the calls, he has no protection other than a bulletproof vest, a cell phone and a panic button. With these bare bones tools, he continues working the fields and fighting for the environment as part of the Association of Community Aqueducts of Tasco.

The story of Pedro Abel Castañeda is repeated over and over again throughout Colombia. According to the Somos Defensores program, there are 170 socio-environmental conflicts in the country. In 2023 alone, the organization recorded reports of 765 aggressions—concentrated primarily in nine departments—against defenders.
Historical violence

To understand the bloody panorama faced by Colombia’s social leaders, it is essential to take a look at the history of violence and how people have organized themselves to protect against it, often in a communitarian manner.

Astrid Torres, the director of Somos Defensores, says social movements in Colombia have been exterminated for at least a century. This has been exacerbated in the context of an armed conflict that has plagued its territory for over 60 years. “For a long time women defenders were considered enemies of democracy, equivalent to guerrillas,” Torres explained in an interview with Ojalá. “This is what we call the doctrine of the internal enemy.”

This permanent tragedy has multiple causes, and although there have been periods of tense calm, it is ongoing through to today. After the signing of a Peace Agreement with the now-extinct Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgencies in 2016, many Colombians thought perhaps we were going to be able to move on. The agreements included measures to safeguard the environment and those who protect it. But in the eight years since it was signed, the government failure to implement the accords has triggered a renewed cycle of violence.

Organizers point out that it is not only the lack of implementation of policies and measures, but also that there are key points yet to be resolved, including the very conception of the notions of protection and emergency. Currently, the National Protection Unit (UNP) provides superficial measures to those under threat, and killings have been registered against people who are part of the protection system. It is unclear how many people under protection have been killed.

The highest level protection consists of a security detail with two armored vans, but in most cases those under threat are given only a bulletproof vest, a cell phone and a panic button, as in the case of Castañeda. As of August of last year, 8,067 people were under UNP protection.

In addition these measures take an individual approach, when resistance in Colombia is most often communitarian and collective.

Added to the lacking protection system is the shameful figure of impunity with regards to the perpetrators of crimes against defenders. Somos Defensores told Ojalá that, according to its study, between 2002 and 2022, the Attorney General’s Office has issued only 179 convictions for murders of human rights defenders. This despite the fact that at least 1,300 complaints have been filed. That’s an impunity rate of 87 percent.
Petro and the COP-16

With the rise of Gustavo Petro, who is historically close to social movements and whose program pushes Total Peace—a plan that seeks dialogue with all illegal armed groups in Colombia—it was hoped obstacles to justice would be removed.

But this has taken longer than expected. The protection of social leaders has been omitted in negotiations related to ambitious pacification policy, even though many of these illegal structures are the main perpetrators. “It makes no sense to open a dialogue if [the lives of] social leaders are not going to be respected,” said Torres, who adds that it is urgent this issue be given greater importance in thinking about peace.

Both Castañeda and Torres understand the problem as structural, and think the government and private actors in particular must work to stop the killings. Today, the regions with the most threats against land defenders tend to align with those where extractivism and the presence of multinationals threaten the environment.

Colombia’s Truth Commission and the Special Jurisdiction for Peace created in the 2016 Agreement shed light on the criminal alliances between companies and illegal armed groups, which are also called “civilian third parties” in the transitional justice system.

Both entities established that national and international companies had dealings with paramilitary structures like the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), paying for the assassination of social leaders who hindered their interests. The most emblematic case is that of the US company Chiquita Brands, which was recently found guilty of similar alliances and forced to pay reparations to eight victims.

With the United Nations Conference on Biodiversity (COP-16) right around the corner (it will be held from October 21 to November 1, 2024 in the city of Cali) the focus is on the environment and those who fight for its conservation, particularly in the Amazon.

Organizations such as Crisis Group have warned of increasing destruction of the Amazon carried out by the post-agreement armed group Estado Mayor Central. Since October 2023, the national government has been holding talks with a faction of this armed group.

Pedro Castañeda will also travel to be at the COP next week. With just a vest and panic button he says he still feels unsafe, but that his best protection is an organized community.

“I was born here, I grew up here, and I’m going to die here,” he said in a phone interview from Tasco. He hopes that one day—in the not too distant future—working in defense of water will not cost him his peace of mind, or his life.

Colombia guerilla group urges delegations not to attend COP16 in Cali

By AFP

October 12, 2024

Colombian army vehicles and troops have been patrolling the streets of Cali to bolster security for COP16 - Copyright AFP/File JOAQUIN SARMIENTO

A Colombian guerilla group on Saturday urged delegations not to attend the COP16 biodiversity summit beginning in the southwestern city of Cali on October 21, after Bogota launched a military offensive against the rebels.

“Faced with the war with which (the authorities) responded to our desire for peace for COP16, we invite delegates from the national and international community to refrain from attending this event,” the Central General Staff (EMC) group said in a post on social media platform X.

Around 12,000 people, including representatives from some 200 countries, are expected to be at the UN-led conference.

The EMC’s message comes in the wake of a military raid that wounded around 17 people in the village of El Plateado in the Cauca department, where the armed group is active.

A dissident faction of the disbanded FARC guerilla group, the EMC has already threatened the summit, saying in July that it “will fail even if they militarize the city with gringos (Americans).”

Colombian army vehicles and troops have been patrolling the streets of Cali — the closest city to EMC-dominated territory — in a bid to bolster security for COP16, which runs until November 1.

Some 3,500 EMC members are estimated to be active and are involved in the drug trade and illegal mining, as well as fighting both the military and groups competing for trafficking routes and territory.

COP16, which takes place weeks before the COP29 climate summit in Azerbaijan’s capital Baku, will assess whether rich countries are making good on their promises to stump up $30 billion a year to help the developing world save its ecosystems.

 

Stop the Distraction: Fix Florida, Not Venezuela

by J.D. Hester Hester / October 9th, 2024

Sen. Rick Scott and Sen. Marco Rubio seem to have issues with the elementary process of counting. Last time I checked, there were fifty states, not fifty-one states, in the United States of America. Unfortunately, Scott and Rubio seem to have missed this lesson in civics class and have somehow wound up believing that they are the representatives of the Venezuelan people.

While it is a tragedy that Scott and Rubio were not able to learn this basic fact prior to being elected to the Senate, it is not surprising. In recent years, Florida has become a platform for Neoconservatives to practice political grandstanding rather than good politics. Instead of focusing on issues which truly matter to their constituents, imperialists like Scott and Rubio have been focused on proposing legislation like the Securing Timely Opportunities for Payment and Maximizing Awards for Detaining Unlawful Regime Officials (STOP MADURO) Act. The STOP MADURO Act proposes that the already preposterously-high fifteen-million dollar bounty for “information leading to the arrest of Nicolás Maduro” to one hundred million dollars. The bill alleges that Maduro and other government officials have been engaged in “conspiring to import cocaine” and using and conspiring to use “machine guns and destructive devices” to carry out “narco-terrorism”.

While many Neoconservatives in Washington have sought to act as judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the conspiratorial claim that Maduro is Venezuela’s Pablo Escobar, many independent journalists have pointed out the obvious flaws in this narrative. According to The Grayzone, the myth that Venezuela is a narco-state has already been debunked by the Washington Office in Latin America (WOLA), a think tank in Washington that generally supports US regime change operations… less than 7% of total drug movement from South America transits from Venezuela”. The bill also claims that Maduro had a “narcoterrorism” partnership with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) for the past twenty years. This similarly dubious accusation has also been discredited as far back as 2019, with Venezuelanalysis reporting that “…FARC was involved in the drug trade only at its lowest levels, levying taxes on coca sales. Moreover, since the 2016 peace accords and FARC demobilization, coca crops in Colombia have reached record levels year after year, confirming that the guerrillas played no major role in the illicit trade.”

Rather than working on behalf of the people of Florida to address the state’s terrible healthcare system, rampant homelessness, and extreme income inequality, Sen. Scott, Sen. Rubio, and their ilk have chosen to put ideology over policy. Instead of making the American Dream an American reality, Neoconservatives in Washington have forever sought to strangle all nations who do not conform to the dogmatic doctrine of market fundamentalism with the binds of sanctions. Sanctions, such as those currently targeting Venezuela, have been shown to lead to the deaths of countless civilians; in Iraq, for example, The Transnational Institute reports that “two million Iraqis… died from sanctions, half of them children”. Similarly, in Cuba, Al Jazeera reports that “With restrictions on the import of food, it has contributed to malnutrition – especially among women and children – and water quality has suffered with chemicals and purifying equipment banned.” For the Neoconservatives, no price is too high to pay for spreading corporate oppression throughout the world.

Clearly, the foreign policy priorities of Senators Scott and Rubio are not in tune with basic morality let alone the wants and needs of their Floridian constituents. Therefore, it is not astonishing that both Rubio and Scott are diehard supporters of Israel’s murderous rampage in Gaza. Both Senators have joined together in making the Orwellian assertion that Israel is the “victim” of Palestine in the United Nations. Furthermore, Rubio has made clear his support for genocide in occupied Palestine saying “I don’t think there’s any way Israel can be expected to coexist or find some diplomatic off-ramp with these savages…. They have to be eradicated.”

In comparison to Senators Scott and Rubio, Venezuela has consistently supported Palestine in its struggle against colonialism. In fact, prior to his passing, President Chavez was one of the most popular leaders in the Arab world for his fearless support of Palestinian self-determination and his efforts to hold Israel accountable for its numerous crimes. To this day, Venezuela has continued to support Palestine in the United Nations by backing South Africa’s International Court of Justice case against Israel. In stark contrast to Scott and Rubio who have poisoned the well of discourse with their irrational and destructive support for Israel, Venezuela has constantly acted as a voice for the voiceless in occupied Palestine.

As they carry on waging legislative warfare on Venezuela’s sovereignty with dubious bills like the STOP MADURO Act, one must ask: are Scott and Rubio truly interested in representing their constituents, or merely the interests of the rich and powerful? If Senators Scott and Rubio have any self-respect, they will cease being pawns in a larger geopolitical game and will redirect their focus back on their constituents. Florida deserves leaders who are problem solvers, not ineffectual thorns in the side of foreign governments.RedditEmail

J.D. Hester is an American writer born and raised in Arizona. He has previously written for Antiwar.com, Front Porch Republic, and CounterCurrents.org. You can find him on his Substack, Hester Unfiltered. You can send him an email at josephdhester@gmail.com. Follow him on X. Read other articles by J.D. Hester.

UN biodiversity summit in Colombia aims to turn words into action

Paris (AFP) – Two years after a landmark UN-brokered deal to protect nature from a massive wave of destruction, delegates will gather at a new COP in Colombia in late October to assess their progress.

Issued on: 07/10/2024 -

The COP16 summit comes as Brazil and other Latin American countries struggle to emerge from one of the worst wildfire seasons in years © Raul ARBOLEDA / AFP/File

Representatives from some 200 countries are expected at the Oct. 21 to Nov. 1 COP16 biodiversity conference in the Colombian city of Cali.

The last Conference of the Parties or COP dedicated to biodiversity in Montreal in 2022 ended with a breakthrough agreement to protect 30 percent of the planet by 2030 from pollution, degradation and the climate crisis.

COP16 will assess the progress made and examine whether rich countries are making good on their promises to stump up $30 billion a year to help the developing world save its ecosystems.

The Cali conference, which takes place two weeks before the COP29 on climate change in Azerbaijan's capital Baku, will be "an implementation and financing COP," Hugo-Maria Schally, the European Union's lead negotiator at the talks in Cali, said.

Colombia, which is the world's most biodiverse country after Brazil, aims to use the summit to take a leadership role on protecting nature and combatting climate change.

"It's a Latin American moment," Colombian Environment Minister Susana Muhamad said at the United Nations in New York last month.

The summit comes as Brazil and other Latin American countries struggle to emerge from one of the worst wildfire seasons in years, blamed chiefly on rampant deforestation and climate change.

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who will host next year's COP30 on climate change, and Mexico's new left-wing president Claudia Sheinbaum, are among a dozen leaders expected at the talks in Cali.

Restoring 30 percent of ecosystems

While hailed for giving Indigenous groups a leading role in protecting natural resources COP host Colombia faces major environmental challenges of its own.

Large areas of forest have been cleared for illicit coca plantations used in cocaine production.

Deforestation surged after an historic 2016 peace deal with the FARC rebel group, as former fighters turned to unregulated farming and ranching.

Those who object put their lives on the line.

Global Witness named Colombia the country with the most murders of land and environmental activists in 2022, with 60 people killed.

"COP16 is not going to be a big decision COP, but it's a particularly important one because it's the first opportunity since that agreement for countries to really signal their commitment," said Dilys Roe, a researcher at the International Institute for Environement and Development in London.

'30 by 30'

The agreement reached at the COP15 summit in Montreal in December 2022 -- the biodiversity equivalent of the Paris accord on climate change which seeks to limit long-term global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius -- was designed to guide global action on nature through 2030.

The headline goal was the "30 by 30" target -- ensuring 30 percent of land and sea areas are effectively conserved and managed by the end of this decade, up from 17 percent of land and around 8 percent of oceans in 2022.

Other targets included restoring 30 percent of degraded ecosystems, cutting environmentally destructive farming subsidies, reducing pesticide use and tackling invasive species.

Time is running out to halt the extinction of species.

According to the United Nations Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), 70 percent of global ecosystems are already degraded.

The challenge for Colombia is to try to come up with a "credible" roadmap for reaching the targets set for 2030, Juliette Landry, senior researcher at France's Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations said.

The hosts have their work cut out for them.

So far only around 20 countries have submitted the updated national biodiversity strategy and action plans (NBSAPs) they committed to provide by COP16.

They have also fallen far short on their promise to increase financial aid to developing countries to $25 billion annually by 2025, rising to $30 billion in 2030.

So far, pledges to a new fund created for the purpose have reached only around $400 million, with only around half of that amount disbursed.

In Cali, developing countries are expected to pressure developed countries to dig deeper for the planet.

They in return are expected to demand that wealthy emerging markets like China also pay their share.

© 2024 AFP

Gold prices and poverty fuel illegal mining in Peru’s Amazon

Reuters | October 1, 2024 | 

The area where the Nanay River (black) meets the Amazon River (brown). (Image by Leonora Enking, Flickr.)

The Nanay River meanders through Peru’s Amazon jungle supplying water to Iquitos city’s half a million inhabitants.


But there are growing concerns about the quality of this water as illegal gold mining, which uses the toxic metal mercury to extract gold, has surged in Peru’s Amazon region since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Villagers in the northern rainforest region of Loreto have become more dependent on illegal mining for their livelihood as the pandemic hit the economy and the illegal activity became more profitable. Gold prices have soared nearly 30% so far in 2024 and are on course for their biggest annual rise since 2010.

The problem is that illegal miners use the metal to extract gold particles from the river silt and then burn off the mercury, which turns to vapour and is absorbed by the surrounding plants, soil and river, said Claudia Vega, head of the mercury program at the Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation.

Her team regularly tests communities and their main staple — river fish — for mercury.


“(Miners) take the gold but the mercury stays here in the Amazon,” Vega told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “What the miners don’t like to talk about is that mercury is a poison.”

Illegal mining has spread across Peru’s Amazon region and the Andes since the Covid-19 pandemic sent the economy into recession, fuelling unemployment and pushing millions of people back into poverty. About 29% of Peru’s population struggled with poverty in 2023, up from 20.2% in 2019, according to the country’s statistics institute.

At the same time, rising gold prices have made illegal mining attractive in a poor region. A dredger operating for 24 hours can rake in 100g or $8,000 worth of gold at $80 per single gram, said Herman Ruiz, an official at the National Forestry and Wildlife Service (SERFOR) and head of the Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve.

Park rangers and local community patrols have managed to keep mining out of the Allpahuayo-Mishana National Reserve in the lower part of the Nanay River, but satellite images sourced by NGO Amazon Conservación show dozens of dredgers higher up in the Alto Nanay-Pintuyacu-Chambira protected area.

Indeed, a 2023 report by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) showed illegal mining was present in 11 of Loreto’s largest rivers that year, including Nanay, but the latter had three times the number of dredgers than all other rivers combined.

According to the report, satellite images detected 98 dredgers in the Nanay River in the middle of 2023, having spotted none at the beginning of 2020.
Remote areas

Ruiz said the illegal mining in Loreto is mainly led by criminal groups from Colombia who recruit locals and train them to build simple dredgers from a converted lorry engine and a wooden raft. Some Brazilians and Venezuelans working for criminal organizations are also involved, he said.

A Colombian gang believed to include dissident members of the now-demobilized Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) rebels uses violence to enforce its rule in remote areas and dominates illegal gold and cocaine trafficking, according to a security official, who asked not be named because of the risk to his safety.

Carlos Castro, the chief environmental prosecutor for Loreto, said it is becoming increasingly difficult for authorities to curb illegal mining activity as it spreads to desolate areas.

He said it can take 12 hours to reach remote outposts by boat and it is even more difficult to reach them by air.

“There is no place to land… because of the curves of this (river) basin,” he said.

The fact that the miners now have access to the internet and can warn one another that the police is coming also makes curbing the illegal mining harder, said Ruiz. The miners installed satellite dishes in the area in recent years, he said.

Meanwhile, it has become increasingly risky to deal with the illegal miners.

Castro said the police and prosecutors are often outnumbered by “hostile villagers” when they reach those areas and that the police has advised prosecutors to take “a certain number of (security) people” when they travel to tackle illegal mining.

“We have been ambushed in the past,” he said.

Ruiz said he has even been a victim of indirect death threats.

“Someone would tell me to be careful; that I’m on the gang’s blacklist”, he said.
Finding poison

Vega took her team to Mishana — where around 80 people live on fishing, farming and community tourism — to take hair samples from residents to test for mercury levels. Mishana is located some 40 km southwest of Iquitos.

Betty Amasifuen, 42, is among those who volunteered to be tested even though she lives many miles downstream from the mining activity.

“For us, who live here in this part of the Nanay River and eat the fish, it’s not good,” said the mother of six.

In the local village hall, Vega told the local population about mercury’s devastating heath impact. She referred to the renowned case in Japan in the 1950s, when children in Minamata Bay were born with congenital deformities and neurological disabilities because of mercury contamination.

“We do not want to be the people or communities contaminated or getting some kind of disease,” said 63-year old Fidencio Zuta, a local resident.

The World Health Organisation classifies mercury as one of the 10 chemicals of major public concern.

Given illegal mining in Loreto is fairly recent, there are no comprehensive studies on its health impact on the local population yet. But on the other side of Peru’s Amazon, where mining has been taking place for decades, a study found the majority of adults were affected.

The comprehensive 2009 study from the Carnegie Amazon Mercury Ecosystem Project showed 78% of adults in Madre de Dios, Peru’s most heavily-mined Amazon region, had mercury levels in their hair above the WHO’s recommended concentration limit of 1ppm, one part per million.

Vega said children were particularly vulnerable.

“When they are exposed when their mother is pregnant, it can harm the way that they learn, they think, their memory,” she said. “It’s affecting how these kids could learn or be productive. So, you’re affecting the kid for their whole life.”

(By Dan Collyns; Editing by Jack Graham and Ana Nicolaci da Costa)

Colombian rebel group Segunda Marquetalia imposes control in restive coca zone

Guerrillas from the FARC dissident group Segunda Marquetalia, currently engaged in complex peace negotiations with the Colombian government, have taken control of southwestern region of Nariño.


A veneer of calm has settled over Nariño, one of the most violent regions of Colombia, where armed groups until recently waged bloody battles for control of vast coca fields.

The guerrilla group Segunda Marquetalia has taken control of the southwestern region – roughly the size of Belgium – using financial backing from Mexican cartels to unify myriad armed outfits, analysts say.

"The change has been spectacular, the groups have united, the violence has reduced considerably," said Jerson David, the president of a local association of subsistence farmers who work in the coca fields.

"Here, people grow coca according to the rules of the Segunda Marquetalia," he added.

Nearby, workers carry sacks filled with vivid green coca leaves that will be crushed and mixed with gasoline and chemicals in a makeshift laboratory, making a paste that will later become cocaine.

Coca fields stretch as far as the eye can see around the town of Zavaleta. In 2022, the Nariño region grew some 40 percent of the total coca in Colombia – the world's main cocaine producer.

In the town's centre, packs of motorbikes roar down the main street, and men dripping in gold chains and with handguns at their sides stare suspiciously at strangers.

At the entrance to the town hangs an old banner: "Segunda Marquetalia wishes you a Merry Christmas."

'Cauldron of violence'

Until 2016, it was the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) guerrilla group that held a monopoly over the profitable region.

When the group signed a landmark peace agreement with the government that year, "there was a rush to occupy this space," explained Elizabeth Dickinson, an analyst for the International Crisis Group (ICG).

Narino became a "cauldron of violence and competition around drug trafficking."

Segunda Marquetalia was formed by the chief FARC peace negotiator, Luciano Marín -- alias Iván Marquez -- who launched a new rebellion in 2019.

Dickinson said one of the group's commanders had links with Mexican cartels who provided the capital to recruit forces from other regions.

"The Segunda Marquetalia, with that influx of money and fighters, swept through Narino with remarkable speed," in the last two years, she said.

The takeover also involved a bloody war with another FARC dissident group, the EMC (Central General Staff) in 2023.

Since then, Segunda Marquetalia has reigned supreme in this Pacific coastal region, where the Andes descend into the foothills of the Amazon, towards scorching savannah and seaside mangroves.

Nariño in 2023 accounted for 27.3 percent of all victims of conflict in Colombia, according to the Indepaz thinktank.

About 30 massacres have been committed there and 130 community leaders killed since 2016.


'Pact' with locals

In the baking afternoon heat in Zavaleta, coca workers and guerrillas, with beers in hand, flock to bars like "El Patron," bearing the image of the late narco kingpin Pablo Escobar.

The police and army are totally absent, entrenched behind sandbags at their bases dozens of kilometers away.

The guerrillas keep a close watch over coca production and development projects such as road building.

Like several of Colombia's armed groups, Segunda Marquetalia has been involved in stop-start peace negotiations with the government.

"Peace, and the abandonment of coca, requires a transformation of the land, that is to say road construction, electricity networks," the group's second-in-command and chief negotiator, Walter Mendoza, told AFP surrounded by gun-toting men.

The group says it works in the interest of local communities, but experts refer to coercive control of the population.

Local journalist Winston Viracacha described the relationship as a "pact" in which locals carry out projects for the benefit of both sides, in return for payment from the guerrillas who "ensure order and social control."

One reason for the respite from violence is that the armed group is no longer interested in taking on the government directly.

"What interests them is local control to facilitate illegal economic activity. Rather than fighting the army, they want to control the population," said Dickinson.

Segunda Marquetalia has enforced its authority in other towns too, such as coastal Tumaco with its mainly Afro-Colombian population and long history of extreme poverty and violence between armed groups.

Until 2023, "no foreigner could set foot" in Bajito, a neighborhood of Tumaco with a pretty beach where mutilated bodies used to turn up, said municipal councillor Duvan Mosquera Cortes.

Now, "tourists can come here in peace."

However, Dickinson warns that "the situation remains extremely fragile," as a rival armed group could try and edge out the Segunda Marquetalia at any time.

by Hervé Bar, AFP

 

Colombia’s first ever progressive government

Labour Hub Editors

SEPTEMBER 20, 2024

Nick MacWilliam reports on the progress of Gustavo Petro’s administration and previews Justice for Colombia’s fringe meeting at Labour’s upcoming Party Conference.

As eyes look ahead to Colombia’s presidential election in 2026, the current administration of Gustavo Petro – the first progressive government in Colombian history – is striving to turn its vision of a fair and conflict-free society into a reality.

Petro’s 2022 election was rooted in mass rejection of a ruling system that for decades enforced economic hardship on the majority. This was consolidated through state-led violent repression of social movements that challenged the status quo: trade unionists, indigenous communities, peasant farmers and students were routinely targeted by the security forces and their paramilitary proxies.

In April 2021, just over a year before Petro’s election, public indignation erupted in Colombia’s largest social uprising since the 1948 bogotazo (the violent protests that followed the assassination in the capital, Bogotá, of Liberal leader and presidential candidate Jorge Gaitán).

Huge protests across towns and cities were met with extreme state violence, as unarmed protesters were killed, sexually assaulted, beaten and blinded amid virtual impunity for the police officers responsible. The neoliberal system’s legitimacy was in shreds, paving the way for Petro – who had come close to the presidency four years earlier – to win the election on a pledge for transformative change rooted in peace, social investment, environmental protection and human rights.

Since taking office, the Petro government has made notable efforts to advance its progressive agenda. One major area is the peacebuilding strategy known as Paz Total, or Total Peace, that promotes dialogue with armed groups in pursuit of negotiated settlements for their disbandment. The previous government’s disregard for the 2016 peace agreement with the FARC, then Latin America’s largest guerrilla movement, resulted in a proliferation of armed groups. As a consequence, conflict violence continues to affect several regions, as rival groups compete for territorial control, with local populations in the firing line.

Reaching settlements with these groups – which range from guerrillas to paramilitary successors to urban gangs – is a complex task, yet crucial to a stable and lasting peace. However, ongoing confrontation by some groups, which in places has seen ceasefires end, has raised questions over whether Total Peace will achieve its primary objective. International support can help keep the talks on track.

Tackling Colombia’s gaping inequality is another of the government’s core goals. The longstanding impact of oligarchic violence and neoliberal governance has created one of the world’s most unequal societies, with the outgoing Duque government’s woeful management of the pandemic exacerbating social conditions that, at the time of Petro’s election, saw over 40 per cent of the population subsisting below the poverty line.

The new government has proposed a series of expansive social reforms – in healthcare, labour rights, education and pensions – that provide access to essential services for millions of low-earning Colombians. Only the pensions reform has so far been approved, with the others encountering strong opposition in the national Congress, where Petro’s Historic Pact coalition lacks a majority and must find compromises with opposition blocs if it is to enact the economic redistribution so clearly required in Colombian society.

The prospects for Total Peace and the social reforms are just two of the important themes to be discussed in Justice for Colombia’s fringe meeting at Labour Party Conference. The keynote speaker is Historic Pact Congress member Alirio Uribe, who will provide an update on the current situation, while also examining the 2026 election in which Petro cannot be re-elected owing to Colombia’s single-term limit.

While there is awareness that the legacy of violence and inequality that has been the norm for generations of Colombians cannot be overcome in just four years, advances in Total Peace and the social reforms increase the likelihood of a continuation of progressive governance in 2026. Otherwise, Colombia’s traditional elite, still determined to stamp out any challenge to its economic interests, will be optimistic of retaking control of the country. That would be a major step backwards for all those in Colombia who dream of living amid peace and social justice.

If you are attending Labour Party Conference, you can join JfC’s fringe meeting:

‘How a Labour Government Can Support Peace in Colombia’
Tuesday 24th September, 5-6.30pm: Room 14, ACC Liverpool

Please note, you must have a conference pass to attend this fringe.

Alirio Uribe will also be speaking at the following Labour Friends of Progressive Latin America event (open to all):

‘¡Viva la Solidaridad! Stand with Latin America’s Left’

Monday 23rd September, 6.30-8pm: The Racquet Club Hotel and Ziba Restaurant, Liverpool L3 9AG

Click here for more details.

Nick MacWilliam is Trade Union & Programmes Officer at Justice for Colombia.

Image: Colombia – Women Peace and Security: Reintegration of former female combatants is a key piece of implementing peace. https://www.flickr.com/photos/unwomen/52607403838 Creator: UN Women/Pedro P’o | Credit: UN Women/Pedro P’o Copyright: UN Women/Pedro P’o. Licence: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic. CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The Questions at the Heart of Conflict and Peace

By Heather Graci
September 18, 2024



“How do you balance dreams of peace with the complex reality of achieving it,” said conflict researcher Mareike Schomerus, “without giving up on the dream, but without ignoring the reality?”

Tensions permeate the work of those trying to understand the roots of conflict and pathways to peace. What motivates people to accept those they’ve only ever learned to hate? Why do people join extremist groups, and how do some get out? How do institutions contribute to violence, and how can they foster peace?

The answers to questions like these are far from simple. They are nuanced and context-dependent, but not out of reach. Recently, a group of people who have dedicated their careers to finding those answers convened at the third annual Neuropaz conference in Medellín, Colombia.

One of those people is Andrés Casas, the founder and organizer of Neuropaz, an annual conference in Colombia that explores how the behavioral sciences can promote peace. Casas led this year’s conference with support from local and international organizations, including Comfama, Fundación Corona, UNDP Colombia, and the UN Office of Counter-Terrorism. Across the four-day conference and workshop, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers from within Colombia and around the world came together to share what they’ve learned.

Colombia was a fitting setting for the gathering. After more than 60 years of war between the government and guerrilla and paramilitary groups, a peace deal in 2016 brought a formal end to the conflict. It was a significant step for the peace builders who had spent years dedicated to the cause. But their work was far from over. Since then, they’ve been working to ensure that the declaration of peace translates to peace in practice. Neuropaz is part of that ongoing mission.

During the conference, I spoke with eight of the local and international experts who have worked on conflicts in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, and the U.S. and U.K. These are behavioral scientists who have convinced members of al-Qaeda to have their brains scanned in an fMRI machine, consulted with decision-makers on the ground in South Sudan in the years leading up to independence, and provided a platform for former guerrilla combatants and their victims to share their stories together.

Below are their reflections on the questions that define their work, the answers they’ve found so far, and their aspirations for what’s yet to come.

* * *

Economist Pablo Abitbol asks: “How can we build democracy in local communities to nurture more dignified human development?”

Pablo Abitbol is an economist at the Technological University of Bolívar and a member of the Montes de María Regional Space for Peace Construction in Colombia. He studies collective memory, cultural change, and deliberative democracy in an effort to restabilize the territories in Montes de María and Cartagena that were impacted by years of violence. Many of those territories are still governed by corrupt actors that neglect public institutions like education and mental health services. Abitbol works with local leaders to restore the voices of those who have been excluded from the democratic process and political decision-making within their own communities.

“Our approach is to create spaces and processes of democratic deliberation within these communities. We are trying to reincorporate into the democratic process its heart, which is what Amartya Sen calls government by discussion—exchange of arguments, being able to listen attentively and respectfully to others’ positions and worldviews, and being open to reconciling your own worldviews and perceptions with those of other people.

“One thing that emerged from these deliberative assemblies, which is what we call our specific design, is the precariousness of mental health services for these kinds of rural communities. They’re often totally absent or harm-producing.

“But given the absence of good mental services for these communities, many have developed their own practices for taking care of themselves. A paradigmatic example is the tejedoras, the weavers of Mampuján, a group of displaced women from the town of Mampuján. They were displaced by paramilitaries and had to resettle. A lot of pain, a lot of trauma. The women started gathering to make sancocho, which is a delicious soup that is typical of the region, and to take care of their hair. And then they started producing tapestries. Those tapestries tell the memory of their displacement and their resistance, and they have become an incredible work of art that is now in the National Museum of Colombia. And now they have their own museum of Mampuján. That is a clear example of how, in the absence of the institutional service of mental health, they developed their own way of healing anchored in their traditions.

“We have deliberated about how to connect local practices with institutions so that institutions might offer a better kind of service that is more connected with their communities. If you want to have better mental health services, or any other kind of service—state services, public services—you have to change the way that politics is done.”

* * *

Psychologist Boaz Hameiri asks: “Why is it so difficult to change people’s views about conflict?”

Boaz Hameiri is a senior lecturer and head of the Conflict Management and Mediation Program at Tel Aviv University. He studies the psychological barriers to conflict resolution and how we might overcome them. One of those barriers is cognitive freezing—a hallmark of intractable conflict. When our views about a conflict are characterized by closed-mindedness and rigidity, there’s little that activists and policymakers can do to garner support for peace. Unfreezing, then, is central to moving toward peaceful conflict resolution. A useful tool for unfreezing people’s views, Hameiri believes, are metaperceptions.

“Metaperceptions are what we think others think. When we talk about intergroup relations, they refer to what we think members of the outgroup think about us. If I’m Jewish Israeli, a metaperception is what I think Palestinians think about Israelis.

“We find that people tend to have pessimistic metaperceptions. They often think that people from the outgroup think much more negative things about them than they actually do. In a study published in 2020, led by Samantha Moore-Berg, we found that Democrats and Republicans in the United States are essentially in complete agreement: both of them think that the other party thinks much more negative things about them than they do in reality. They think that the other side dehumanizes them much more than reality. They think the other side dislikes them much more than reality. And the differences are staggering—on a 100-point dehumanization scale, the perceived dehumanization and dislike was 20 to 40 points higher than actual dehumanization and dislike.


You’re not trying to change people’s views about the outgroup . . . The only thing that you’re saying is: You think that they think something about you, but the truth is something else.

“But it’s not only that the divide is so big—it’s also consequential. If you think that the other side dislikes you, you dislike them in return. There’s a reciprocal response. If they dehumanize you, you dehumanize them.

“So metaperceptions are overly pessimistic and completely false in the vast majority of cases. If that’s the case, then you can correct these kinds of perceptions. And if you correct those erroneous metaperceptions, you can also reduce dehumanization and dislike.

“You’re not trying to change people’s views about the outgroup. You’re not trying to contest anything that they think about the outgroup. You’re not trying to persuade them to think something different. The only thing that you’re saying is: You think that they think something about you, but the truth is something else. It’s much easier to do—people will be less defensive.”

* * *

Conflict researcher Mareike Schomerus asks: “When working toward peace, how do we make visible the tension between an idealized version of the future and the reality of getting there?”

Mareike Schomerus is a vice president at Busara, an organization working to incorporate behavioral science into development work in the Global South, and author of Lives Amid Violence: Transforming Development in the Wake of Conflict (open access here). She studies the emotions, memories, experiences, and actions of people in situations of violent conflict to better understand how we might facilitate peace. Lately, Schomerus has been thinking about the mental models of conflict held by practitioners working toward peace and the cognitive dissonance that arises when reality is at odds with those models.

“I worked on the conflict in South Sudan five or six years before independence. Although this was a seemingly happy moment for a country about to become independent, we could see that conflict dynamics were already developing.

“I was trying to convey that concern to decision-makers. They would patiently and politely listen to me, but at some point you could see this cognitive dissonance click into action. They would go, ‘Yeah, but people wouldn’t throw away newly gained independence to go back to war.’ The decision-makers would dig in their heels and effectively say, ‘I just cannot imagine that this would be any other way than exactly how I imagine it to be.’

“There was this international wave of consensus that carrying South Sudan through the democratization process, elections, and a referendum on independence was going to be a huge international freedom fighter success story. After South Sudan went into horrific civil war, a lot of senior decision-makers said, ‘Well, if we’d only known.’ But people had written about this—it just didn’t fit into the narrative, the mental model of peacemaking, so it couldn’t be heard.

“People often imagine peace processes to be romantic, but the reality is human. The romanticism can be detrimental because it means you ignore the real problems. But sometimes it’s also quite beautiful—that’s where human dignity, hope, and beauty lie. How do you balance dreams with realities without giving up on the dreams, but without ignoring the reality? And if we know this tension to be true—the cognitive dissonance between dream and reality—how do we make it visible?”

* * *

Cognitive scientist Nafees Hamid asks: “Why do people join and leave extremist groups?”

Nafees Hamid is the research and policy director of XCEPT at King’s College London. He investigates how trauma and mental health influence an individual’s propensity for peace or violence. He has also studied political violence among groups spanning jihadists, white nationalists, and QAnon to better understand how individuals get pulled into extremist groups, and how we might pull them back out again.

“When people hold sacred values—values so morally important that they’re willing to give their lives—the material incentives that governments typically use to dissuade violence not only fail but actually backfire. If you’re trying to get people to compromise on their sacred values (if you’re trying to negotiate with the Taliban or trying to convince someone to not join a neo-Nazi group, for example), then you would be better off avoiding material incentives or disincentives. Instead, things like social inclusion, social norms, acknowledgment, symbolic concessions, making people feel like they’re heard, giving them space to talk—all become useful.

“Tools like social inclusion aren’t going to get rid of your sacred values, but they can adjust what you’re willing to do for them. Maybe you’re not going to fight, maybe you’re not going to kill people. On the other hand, when you socially exclude people, as our neuroscience studies on early-stage extremists show, you can see nonsacred values turning into sacred values. You can see that at the level of the brain. You can see both an increase in sacred values and an increased willingness to fight and die for those sacred values.


How do you make the extreme group feel . . . that they’re still part of the broader society, while at the same time making it clear that you do not support their level of violence?

“Now think about the wake of a terrorist attack, for example. You have political leaders telling this broader group, ‘You must condemn this extremist group in your midst. You must say they are not one of us.’ I understand where that’s coming from, but what you’re actually doing is severing the only vector of influence we have over these extreme people.

“It’s like telling people who have a child or relative in a cult to condemn them for being part of the group—to stop talking to them, to stop listening. Guess what’s going to happen if you do that? They become more a part of the cult. If you want to influence the cult, you want to make sure that each of those cult members still has multiple connections to the outside world—that’s the only way you can influence who they are and what they do.

“This is why demands for the broader population to condemn the more extreme population can, in some cases, make the problem worse, rather than better. And so the balance that the broader population must find is: How do you make the extreme group feel like they belong, that they’re still part of the broader society, while at the same time making it clear that you do not support their level of violence?”

* * *

Economist Sandra Polanía-Reyes asks: “How do we influence people’s preferences to achieve a less divided, more integrated society?”

Sandra Polanía-Reyes is an associate professor at the University of Navarra and a research associate at the Navarra Center for International Development. She studies social norms, trust, and cooperation and works to steer people toward prosocial behavior—to help them make decisions for the common good in contexts including migration and peace building.

“Mainstream economics would describe endogenous preferences—those shaped by our economic and sociocultural environment—as complex. But actually, in one word, it’s education. As we learn, we define our preferences, and then we behave according to our preferences. This is why early intervention is crucial. The brain is still developing, so helping children, teenagers, or young adults adopt prosocial behaviors during these formative years can have a lasting impact.

“For example, when kids are exposed to different phenotypical groups—in Europe, you have Black and Caucasian Europeans, African communities, refugees from Syria—in their public school classrooms when they are very young, there is evidence that when they are teenagers, it’s completely normal to interact with people that are different from them. We play together. We make the same mistakes. We both like soccer.

“This is an example in terms of phenotype, but of course there are many kinds of differences. In Colombia, we have Venezuelans and Colombians, and we are very similar physically, ethnically, religiously—so why does this still happen?

“Across contexts, we find that influencing endogenous preferences in kids by exposing them to diverse groups results in adults who are more generous, care about others, and are open to diversity—so many positive attributes that otherwise would have been much harder to cultivate in adults whose past experiences have shaped preferences that are far more difficult to change.”

* * *

Technologist and innovation researcher Martin Waehlisch asks: “How do we use new technologies to address global challenges in conflict prevention and peacemaking?”

Martin Waehlisch has been a leader in innovation at the United Nations Department of Political and Peacebuilding Affairs and is now a researcher at the University of Birmingham. He focuses on how we can borrow knowledge from disciplines that haven’t typically played a role in the peace process—with a particular focus on computational social science—to measure things we haven’t been measuring, to communicate more accurately and effectively with peace constituencies, and to bring voices to the forefront that aren’t usually part of the peace process.

“Technology can play a role in the conflict prevention, management, and peace building phases equally. First, we can use new technologies to prevent conflict—for instance, to help us get a sense of public sentiments. When we know something is brewing, the data that we have on hand might ordinarily be built based on surveys or social media analysis in the best case. But now there are ways that we can multiply data sources to get a more thorough idea about what the public thinks at large, and those issues can then be addressed in order to prevent an outbreak of violence.

“Then we have the actual ongoing peace negotiation, which is right in the middle of the war. That’s where technology can help to bring people together who wouldn’t normally have the chance to be heard by politicians. One example is the digital dialogs we’ve been running for years where artificial intelligence is used to achieve the scale of a poll, but the intimacy of a focus group. Imagine thousands of people talking to each other at the same time about the same issue in a 45-minute conversation, and then an AI listening digitally to every individual, and then summarizing everything to instantly give the peace mediator a sense of what’s relevant.


Imagine thousands of people talking to each other at the same time . . . and an AI listening digitally to every individual, and then summarizing everything to instantly give the peace mediator a sense of what’s relevant.

“Trauma work usually comes at the very end of the peace process. I’m curious about how machines allow us to have conversations in a deeper way, in comparison to human-to-human conversations, when it comes to overcoming trauma. There’s research showing that people often feel more comfortable talking to a machine than a human psychologist—there seems to be some comfort in talking to an object whose memory can be deleted. It also gives more privacy and creates a sense of safety, to a certain extent. We only have a limited number of psychologists or mental health workers, so that’s where these technologies can step in. But of course, this must be approached with sensitivity and responsibility, as many questions remain around AI, including concerns about algorithmic biases and hallucinations.”

* * *

Behavioral science specialist Josh Martin asks: “How do ‘normal’ people—those who otherwise seem like typical members of society playing typical roles—come to participate in extreme action?”

Josh Martin is a lead expert in countering extremism at the United Nations Office of Counter-Terrorism and former director at ideas42 and Beyond Conflict, a project dedicated to applying behavioral science toward conflict resolution. One theme of his peace and conflict work is the often subtle pathways toward extremism and how we might use our knowledge of human behavior to help people detect, avoid, and escape them.

“One lens through which I often view this problem is channel factors—the bucket of behavioral mechanisms that conspire to put you on a path that you may not realize you’re on. And then they keep you there by imposing some nonmonetary cost for leaving that path.

“A lot of people who end up in extremist organizations, for instance, start on a path that looks nothing like that. Channel factors are things like networks of friends or your information environment on social media, but also much more mundane things like the timing of when you’re exposed to certain messages. These things all contribute to the existence of this channel that pushes you toward extremism.

“An example is the case of Adolf Eichmann. I just finished reading Hannah Arendt’s book about the banalities of evil, and there’s a quote by Eichmann: ‘It was like being swallowed up by the party against all expectations and without previous decision. It happened so quickly and suddenly.’ He ended up working on the Holocaust and murdering millions of people without any ideological predisposition on his part. Arendt is pretty skeptical about this—he’s not blameless. Just because people can be guided without their knowledge toward an extreme doesn’t make them blameless. We’re all still accountable for our actions. But she cites him as much more of an example of the situation acting on an individual than an individual who was violent from the beginning.

“We often want to console ourselves by thinking that people who do bad stuff are just bad because that keeps us from seeing ourselves in them. But all the evidence goes in the other direction. We are all the sort of people who might. It’s not that we’re all evil, or that there’s evil inside of us. That’s not the point. The point is that we are all people who, under the wrong set of circumstances, would do the wrong thing.

“And to be clear: you would never tell victims of armed conflict that they shouldn’t blame their perpetrators for the violence and atrocities. The distinction I would draw is between accountability and prevention. We should hold people accountable for not doing more to get themselves out of the channel. But it is totally fine to analyze the future behavior of others in a way that would lead us toward better prevention strategies. If we appreciated the ways in which the modern world can act upon somebody, then we might design the modern world slightly better.”

* * *

Psychologist Andrés Casas asks: “Can people change?”

Andrés Casas is a doctoral researcher studying neuroscience and conflict resolution across Latin America, the United States, Africa, and the Middle East. He is also the founder and organizer of Neuropaz, and the reason that all the experts quoted in this piece—among many other researchers and practitioners from Colombia and around the world—came together as a part of this effort to advance the science of peace. He shared a personal anecdote that captures the heart of his work.

“I grew up in a country where not supporting your side of the conflict was seen as inappropriate. You’re a coward—you’re not supporting your national identity while we’re fighting against these terrorists, the worst people in the world, who kidnap people, who commit massacres.

“But my grandpa was a political activist back in the 1940s. His mission, in a sense, was to educate us about the real situation of the country. And he worked with a famous political leader called Jorge Eliécer Gaitán who was an inspiration to all rebel causes—he was from one of the poorest sectors, made it through law school, and became an incredible communicator about the injustices of the country.

“Gaitán was assassinated in Bogotá in 1949, and his death changed the history of Colombia. That event was called El Bogotazo because the city got destroyed, and it sparked the outbreak of violence that persisted through the next 60 years. My grandpa was working with him, yet the people who rose up to avenge his death were responsible for the atrocities that followed. In my family, the idea that things are not black-and-white and that you need to educate yourself about context and the nuances of reality was very important.


If we appreciated the ways in which the modern world can act upon somebody, then we might design the modern world slightly better.

“That’s why I got into this. My mom, who has already passed away, was against FARC because she always worked to provide services for people who were victims of the insurgent violence. Colombia has the second highest rate of internal displacement after Syria, and my mother devoted the last part of her life to helping people in that situation. I’m so proud. But again, my mother was very prejudiced against FARC members because she saw the effects of what they did.

“When I was younger, difficult situations in my family made me think that people cannot change. I saw my mom working hard and doing this stuff for other people, but she was prejudiced against FARC. It was confusing. Growing up, I had a very difficult relationship with my mom, politically speaking, because she was on one side, I was on the other side.

“But my grandpa had educated me about politics. That’s why I became a political scientist. I want to go beyond just understanding political systems, I want to understand how political change happens. In a sense, my work was trying to convince my mom to think differently.

“She was diagnosed with cancer back in 2000. And before she passed, Emile [Bruneau, a peace scientist and former collaborator of mine who has also since passed away] and our team had managed to do the first stage of our project to help correct misperceptions of former FARC combatants and foster their peaceful reintegration into society. We had conducted the interviews, developed the first videos, and run the first study to find the video that worked best to reduce dehumanization and increase support for peace.

“My mother was sick already, but she was still aware. ‘Mom, I want to show you what we’re working on,’ I said to her. So we played the video, and I asked her, ‘What do you think about it?’

“And she told me, ‘Maybe I was wrong.’”

Disclosure: Mareike Schomerus is a vice president at Busara which provides financial support to Behavioral Scientist as an organizational partner. Organizational partners do not play a role in the editorial decisions of the magazine.

Heather Graci is an editor at the Behavioral Scientist and an editorial researcher who has worked with authors Angela Duckworth and Dan Heath. Previously, she was a research coordinator at the University of Pennsylvania’s Behavior Change for Good Initiative. She graduated in 2019 from Carnegie Mellon University with degrees in Behavioral Economics and Psychology.