 All right, I think we're looking good to get started. Awesome, cool. Welcome everybody to this webinar. I'm really excited for the topics we'll be getting into in just a moment with our wonderful panelists. The name of the webinar is Environmental Injustice, Combating Threat to Land Defenders and we'll be discussing the question, why do governments and gangs alike target land defenders and what can we do to fight back? My name's Teddy Ogborn, I am CodePink's wing, Wars Not Green Campaign Coordinator, focusing on the intersections of militarism, both domestic and international, and the climate crisis and environmental injustice. I'm joined also by CodePink Latin America Coordinator, Samantha, would you like to introduce yourself as well? Sure, hi everyone. Thanks Teddy and to all of our panelists, to Briseida, to Matthew for being here and to everyone who's joining us now. I'm also really excited to be on this webinar with Briseida, who is an amazing human rights defender, land defender, just a strong Colombian land defender who has received many threats due to her activism and her work. Thank you, Samantha. So for today's webinar, we'll go ahead and start with some introductions from our panelists. They'll speak to the importance of their work during land defense and the regions where they are at work as activists with increasing militarism and fascism globally. This is an incredibly important topic to study and understand because as the material realities of farmers, agricultural workers, peasants or people that depend on nature and trees to live, which is all of us has continually threatened, we must rise up and we must defend this land. So first, I'd like to introduce Matthew Johnson. Matthew Johnson is a support for organizations, lead meditations in yoga in the forest and recently started a series of forums so people are better informed issues at hand. They're no answer. Matthew, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me, Teddy. It's a pleasure to be here and it's always good to know that people want to know more about this struggle. What we're seeing in Atlanta is the confluence of so many of the major issues that will be affecting us for the years to come. We're looking at environmental degradation, clear examples of environmental racism, as well as police violence and the implications of racism that are always involved there in anti-black especially. What we're looking at is the destruction of the largest forest in any major urban area in America to replace it with the largest militarized police training facility in North America. And this is all being done in the black neighborhood that already has five detention facilities in the neighborhood in addition to a landfill. So essentially this space is being used as the refuse essentially the bowels of capitalism and racialized capitalism in this black neighborhood where there's already issues with flooding and poison water. Another thing that has been a part of our fight has been having the clean water act by the EPA and forest. This is fairly unprecedented that you have a legislation by the EPA that has no deadline or enforcement attached to it. So this particular part of the river, the South River where there are 400,000 black residents and every time that it rains more than a 10th of an inch the Atlanta decab sewage system overflows into the water supply and there's already more sediment than is supposed to be in the daily flow of the water. There's no deadline for enforcement to clean it. However, where you have a place that is white and affluent just up the river you see enforcement where this has to be cleaned by 2027 where it's 76% black is absolutely no enforcement. So let alone all the issues of police violence we also like to highlight these issues that really have not one effects for everybody. And this only happens in these black areas. I don't wanna go over my time right now and I'm sure that we'll get to more details later. Thank you so much Matthew looking forward to hearing some more about your work and thank you so much for sharing that introduction now. Next I'd like to bring up Bruceda Lemos Rivera. She is a woman, mother, peasant farmer and social leader from the municipality of Miranda, Norte de Calca. She is a member of the National Single Agricultural Trade Union Federation or Fence Wagrell and the Proc Constitution Association of the Peasant Reserve Zone of Miranda or ASPSONAC and La Finca de Alvera where among other leaderships she plays a fundamental role in the promotion and creation of the peasant university in Finca de Alvera. In addition, she works tirelessly for the implementation of the 2016 Peace Accord, is part of the planning commission, the victims table and is part of the development plan with a territorial approach or PDET of the municipality of Miranda. Bruceda, thank you so much for joining us and for our listeners we'll be interpreting Bruceda's responses from Spanish to English. Gracias, gracias a ustedes. Thank you guys. Bueno, mi nombre es Bruceda. My name is Bruceda. Demo Rivera. I'm a mother, head of household, four children, two boys and two girls. I'm a Juan Suagrista woman from Northern Calca and I'm part of the victims movement. I'm a woman from Asopronac, a movement from Miranda Calca. I'm a very activist woman. I'm involved in human rights struggles and I think we need to promote education. Something that has been denied to us in our country. Accessing education has been one of our greatest struggles in our country. Thank you so much. Wonderful, thank you so much, Bruceda, for being here and for joining us. So now we're going to jump into a few questions just to get the conversation started. After these questions we'll open up for an audience Q&A. Of course this is a discussion, so Bruceda and Matthew or any one of the panelists here, if something comes up for you that you'd like to ask some more about or to clarify please go right ahead. I want to start with a rather broad question but a really important one. We can discuss it, which is why is environmental work increasingly being criminalized? Why is environmental work increasingly being criminalized? Matthew, maybe we can start with you. Yes, a couple of things to note. Right now in our struggle in Atlanta, Over the past two months, we've had 19 people arrested for domestic terrorism and one of our friends murdered in the force. These charges are being put forward indiscriminately. Everybody who just happened to be in the woods one particular day, people that were pepper sprayed shot with rubber bullets and forcibly taken out of trees. People that just happened to be at the wrong protest and got swooped up by the police indiscriminately are being charged with domestic terrorism with no grounds. This is 2023 in the state of Georgia and the United States. What we are seeing is the final breaths of the global capitalist system. This is dystopian. It seems like this would be out of its science fiction novel. But here we are, where people are fighting to make sure that they are protecting the last major forest in this urban area that stops Atlanta from having a lot of the deleterious effects of other places that have comparable daily commutes. But this gets in the way of profits for war and then the expansion of state violence for two. Let me explain. So in Atlanta, there are two fights happening in the forest at the same time. StopCupCity, a lot of people know about but then there was also a part that's called stop the swap. And this is where someone named Ryan Milsep was aiming to build the largest soundstage in the southeast on 40 acres of land that was bought. And he and his company at the time, Black Hills Studios, had said that they had done the due diligence and the reports and reported that the land was ready to build on so they cleared out all this forest land that they had bought. And then once they cleared it and began to build, they realized that it was swamp land. Now, if you had done the due diligence that you said, you would have known that. However, they didn't. They rushed to the paperwork because they're greedy and they don't really care much for the land. Now, after they have overstepped in this way, they then petitioned the Cap County to sell a public park in order for them to build this soundstage in exchange, they say that they will build a park in this black neighborhood and name it Michelle Obama Park because they think that our people are stupid and that we'll go for these signifiers as opposed to understanding the impact that having trees and forest on our entire buyer. So that's one part of the play. Now you have stopped Cops City that most people know about. Where this place that was originally Muscogee land that was then made into the slave plantation that was then made into what was called the Atlanta prison farm where people were picked up for petty offenses like being drunk in public, being poor in public, loitering, of course. And all of these things where black men were arrested for petty crimes and then made to work on this land for no money, post-slave, remind you, in order to provide food for the rest of the prison system of Atlanta. And for context, when Kwame Terrey, also known as Stokely Carmichael, was arrested for protesting in Atlanta, he was held at the Atlanta prison farm. The only reason why this prison farm was ever shut down in the 1990s is because so many people came in that had been poisoned from the water there. And there were folks that had died. So this is the background for them now building the largest police training facility in North America on this same plot of land when Atlanta has about the 19th largest police force. As we've seen in some of their documents, 57% of the people that will be training in this facility will actually be from the state of Georgia. 43% of them will be from outside of the state. And then in addition to that, we already have what's called Gilly, which is the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange where Atlanta police travel to Israel and the Israeli Defense Force travels to Atlanta so that they can practice different tactics for crowd control. Now, this cannot be separated from the flag. In fact, Atlanta is the blackest major city in the country. And it's also the most surveilled city in the country because of the 2017 implementation of Operation Shield. Now, all of this state, this police training facility as well as Operation Shield is being done by the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is essentially a booster club for the Atlanta Police Department where there's absolutely no public check on the money that goes into the police department. And so it's dark money from corporations that's going into policing that's further militarizing as well as surveilling our people. And this is wholly tied to being able to extract as much profit as possible from folks that don't have the agency to fight back because of the ingrained imbalance in power in capitalism. In 2022, okay, the top 1% globally earned $26 trillion in new wealth, while the bottom 99% got $16 trillion in new wealth. We're seeing a constant squeeze on people that are actually working to make money. And in order to keep this, essentially we're dealing with the paranoia responses of the richest people in the country to really enforce these laws because, frankly, people are fed up. Atlanta, although it's called the Black Mecca in a lot of cases throughout the United States, has the largest racial wealth income gap, has the largest racial wealth gap of any major metropolitan area in the city. We also, if Georgia was a country would have the fourth largest incarcerated population of any country in the world. This nation, especially the state, is addicted to cheap black labor and this reinforces the capitalist system. So when we're fighting back, we're really fighting back against state violence and private interests, and that's why it's so important that we stop cup city. Thank you so much for that response, Matt. Yeah, I'm just stuck on your words. You know, their intent on extracting as much profit as possible because of the ingrained power and balance of capitalism, right? This is a horrific and really evident manifestation of that. And, you know, it's so evident in this case, how and when to fight back in a system that so implicitly controls all other parts of our lives. So I think, you know, you're highlighting a really crucial part of your work down there. Thank you. I'd like to turn it over to Preseta as well. Preseta, your perspective on why is environmental work increasingly being criminalized? What do you think? Maybe are we waiting for Preseta's mic to come on or just for some interpretation? What do you say? Hello. Jack? Yeah. Yes. Well, here in Colombia, since the Spanish conquest, we saw a demarcation of how the transitions that we've had were going to be. We were told, I love you, Barbara. And you're not responsible for the Spanish that came here to our country. And they say they discovered America. We know that that's not true. After that, what happened was a great stealing of wealth and a plundering which continues to today. I don't think it's that different through what Matthew is saying. We live through something a lot alike. We have a country that is, has a lot of fresh water. Despite all the environmental extraction and damage, we still have a lot of fresh water available. We still have a lot of fresh water. And wealth in our forest, despite our land was populated after the Spanish conquest. The first things to be populated were the mountainous regions and the fertile grounds or fertile lands were stripped from us and were colonized. That was one of our biggest issues as long as we've had this long war of over 200 years of conflict. Since the Green Revolution, we've seen the implementation of the green package from the United States. Basically a policy that was very clear from the United States and Latin American countries. We've seen that that has blown up into extractive industries. In 2007, 2008, there was a free trade agreement signed where you can see us Colombians that we can compete with that deal that was signed. We can't because there is no help for campesinos in Colombia. We don't have access to any education or subsidies. Everything we've done here we've done by ourselves because the landlord, they help each other but no one helped us. So when they signed this free trade agreement we knew that that was going to bring multinationals and that's exactly what happened. The multinationals came, the coca crop and cocaine became kind of multinational. Cocaine was not consumed in Colombia. We're basically wage laborers. We provide the supply but the demand comes from the United States, Spain and Europe. That's where we had a lot of issues. The rural areas in Colombia began to depopulate and we started to see violence. Extractivism has been clear. Defending a river or defending the Amazon, defending the Colombian Massif is basically as a social leader is basically a death sentence. They kill a lot of environmental defenders. They kill a lot of human rights defenders because it's more valuable to extract resources than it is to promote community development. It's sad what happens but here in Colombia the nexus or the connections between the government with the United States government and the U.S. The U.S. basically owns Colombia and they apply their own policy. This is a U.S. policy. They practically say what economic policies have to be implemented and how we're going to defend ourselves from a country like the United States but they act like they're the owners of our country and the U.S. has been implemented without consulting us. Everything's like this. Mining, basically every policy is defined by the United States and Washington. Even education is imposed by foreign powers. So for us it's been really hard because here we have death sentence applied to us. So we have to take responsibility and we have to be a defender, someone who has to live every day thinking that they might get killed every time they leave their home. They might not see their families. Thank you for saying that and thank you for those really powerful testimonies. I just want to highlight that the United States on two countries in Latin America after they've come and extracted resources and have polluted the rivers and have polluted the water and which have led to a lot of environmental defenders being killed. And I think both of you already kind of talked about this a little bit but if you'd like to emphasize a little bit more about how this militarization of your region impact your environmental activism or of others. Matthew, would you like to start? Well, if you notice when I was giving my initial explanation I did not speak in first person. There are very few things at this point when you have the police and the entire state apparatus or the church and people with domestic terrorism. It necessitates that you change how you move and what you say. And that is the space that we're in now. We're having to learn how to fight because for a long time there was just a very committed core of folks that had been pushing this fight forward. Although we have wide support there were so many people especially in the Atlantic community that really didn't know how to plug in. And there was like a solid group of people some from outside within the Atlantic community activists and organized. However, what we have focused on now is building out a stronger base of support where folks feel comfortable plugging in. What we've realized is we need this to be a mass movement because throughout this time we had exhausted all of our electoral options at the in the fall of 2021 we had record amounts of public comment 70% of which was speaking out against this project when we were doing polls of the surrounding neighborhoods and ordinate amounts of people had not known until we told them which had been a major part of this project secrecy but when they did they thought it was outrageous. As a matter of fact I talked to about the shooting range and then the detonation of bombs in their neighborhood on the site already and many of these people thought this was gang activity but it was actually the police that were causing these disturbances so they were creating an environment where people thought that you needed the police because people thought of the disruptions and the danger they were hearing around them was actually gang. Well, I mean technically you can make an argument that the police in Atlanta have just become a protection factor but I say that to say this what we've seen is a necessity to get more people involved at several levels that otherwise would not have thought of themselves as police abolitionists and we're having to make the case very clear and really go line by line because what people find is when we start to explain all of the constituent parts of these projects we start to uncover a lot of the mythology they hold around policing as police being the good guys and not fully understanding how deeply militarized they have become and where all of this money is going for instance in the United States with the 40% of the assets the Pentecan budget can't be accounted for 60% right only 40% they can account for where the money goes right and many of these surpluses in the going to local police departments that's one thing and you know so this like militarization has been happening for a very long time and so we're having to get a little bit more crafty about the ways that we move and also how we're viewed by the wider public because especially in the Atlanta context so many things are controlled by the corporation especially the media for instance the main newspaper in Atlanta the Atlanta Journal Constitution is owned by Cox Enterprises which is a media as well as several other different business line conglomerate it's old money in Atlanta now the CEO of Cox Enterprises Alex Taylor is also the chief fundraiser for this militarized police training facility and we have to cajole the AJC simply to put a caveat when they're writing about Cox City to remind people that they are owned by the people that are fundraising for Cox City and that have funded Cox City and then their family foundation Cox Foundation has also put about $15 million behind this project so I mean so we're looking at webs of webs of corruption and militarization and having to make this case to the wider public because quite frankly we don't have the guns to push back so when I was hearing Briseida like really talk about the situation in Columbia it struck me because in some ways there are certain concerns that we are only starting to grow because I believe that a lot of the folks that we work with were operating in a way that was predicated on the police in the state following some sort of rules which we've only now realized that they damn sure won't right and it seems as if our comrades in Columbia have been living in this reality for much longer so in that way there are many things that we're going to have to learn and I'm very thankful for our network of indigenous organizers from all around the country that have been willing to support and care for us as we continue to build and adapt in a way that many people didn't think would be necessary Thank you Matthew and thanks so much for making that connection I think in Columbia I think there is a lot in the US that we need to learn about what our government is exporting abroad in terms of militarizing communities abroad just the same way that it has been doing here in the US and unite those struggles I think that's super important Briseida, is there anything else that you would like to add in terms of how you see the militarization in your community and how it impacts your work? Well you know the regimes that work closely hand in hand our country what we've seen for years is links they say there's been self-defense forces or paramilitary that we know we're paramilitary and when we went to investigate now with the special jurisdiction for peace with the peace accords we saw that what we all have been saying in those black and indigenous communities have said alliances between the army with the paramilitaries in Columbia basically that's been latent that our military forces are dark forces we've said that there's black eagles in the day we knew that it was the army all along and the police and intelligence services have always been forces that have worked more to protect that they do this because an army is supposed to protect the people and protect the borders against other states but not to kill its own people but here that's what it's been like you know the killing of the UP party has been a nexus between the police and the military it has been really difficult because living with the army in our territory is knowing that during the day there's an army but during the night there are dark forces and right now there's a great transition but it still continues in our territory we see paramilitaries working with the army and we know that the army the community involved even children involved to try and get them to serve their own interests what do we see? we see an alliance between congresspeople, mayors people who are still working for the multinationals and their interests so what they protect is capital that's being extracted having rivers it depends on us being having a hydroelectric dam that produces energy but not for us we live without electricity basically because we're not included but they sell the energy to other countries at subpar prices but for us we have to pay high prices for our energy the same thing with the gold mining everything has to do with mineral extraction you know we put the dead bodies and we see the same thing with the drug war we put the dead bodies our people are killed and displayed killing our environment but we don't keep the wealth that's always accumulated by the political elite not a legitimate government that defends the people but that are they bend the knee to foreign powers that basically govern our country for us it's very sad but we don't feel taken care of even though we're seeing a transition to a new government we had great expectations but it's very difficult we need a long process a country that has seen 200 years of extractivism of politics of death and extermination it's not easy for a government that's only there for four years can transform all of that in an instant because we don't have an attorney general that's on board we don't have a coalition in congress that's strong enough we have politicians that have replaced narco-trafficking and are now in charge of the drug trade so for us it's very frustrating having the army and the militarization of our communities we do not feel taken care of we feel afraid and we know in our territories that all the violence that happens happens because of the military this government says they want a military that saves lives but that's a big challenge the new president is trying to tell the military to comply with the constitution but it's many years that they've been been serving interests that violate human rights that's a doctrine that the US has imposed and it's not gonna be easy to take out of their mind the idea that the people are the enemy and that the elites are their friends thank you so much for that response Briseida and yeah I'm still thinking about what you've just shared about how even with a mythology of capitalism benefiting everyone in trickle down kind of way the immediate material reality for your community for example you bring up the hydropower dams that energy doesn't go to your community as you've just shared but at the moment we could somehow excuse extraction and extractivism at that scale it is immediately clear who it benefits and who it serves and I think that's so true in Matthew's case as well we're looking at the destruction of the Atlanta force to build this massive essentially playground for racist policing and black and brown people in America and I think the world over probably know not make their community safer it makes them much worse off so thank you so much for that perspective I'd like to move on to another question which has been touched on but I'm wondering if there's anything we would like to add so what are political what are the political or economic interests that are behind the aggression against the work you are doing what are the political or economic interests behind the aggression against the work you're doing with Matthew again if you're ready once again I would like to steal some thoughts from Bruce Aida when you are explaining how although you have your people and government offices that it's run by the United States very much we feel a similar situation being black Americans in a city whose largest population of any group is black and you have had 50 years of black mayor's city yet still you end up with the largest racial wealth income gap of any major city in the United States you really have to start the question how many of these mayors are serving right because it's certainly not the interest of their African American constituents and it's just so painful because so many of us are so excited to see faces of our own people in high places and yet we are continually betraying the same thing that we felt with Barack Obama by 2016 you know this Obama was from Chicago and it had astronomical rates of murders of black men murdered yet nothing was done about it so so that's just something that I wanted to make sure that I touched on and what we have to see is that when we're looking at the incarcerated population of Georgia in general once again I would like to state this statistic because it's very important if Georgia were a country in and of itself it would have the fourth largest incarcerated population of any nation in the world just right here in Georgia and this is because once again the state is addicted to cheap black labor and also the labor movements of the 70's were just drained of their economic power there was never reinvestment in our communities to build for themselves so essentially you had lots of white private interests siphoning off the best of black and brown folks for their own interests and then with everybody scrambling just to support themselves building among communities just seemed so infeasible and so you have a handful of African Americans that do very well for themselves in Atlanta and the vast majority of cases it's because they just solely look out for themselves and you know I like to stay away from crabs in the bucket language because it's more so crabs in a boil right it's people just scrambling just trying to make their own way out and they're not really concerned with everybody else out around it's not out of spite that we're pulling each other down it's because people are solely trying to save themselves so I mean these are some of the racialized dynamics of the issues that we're dealing with but also Atlanta has tons of corporations coming and they sell out their own public in order to do so you have Microsoft is building a 90 acre campus in Bankhead a very black area of Atlanta but you have Atlanta is ranked 6th among states for Fortune 500 companies headquartered right here and it's because the taxes are so low that it really doesn't benefit any of the people and many of the people that they're hiring they are importing from other states so whereas they would call a lot of the people that were arrested from out of state as domestic terrorists outside agitators I'd argue that a lot of these corporations are outside agitators because they're damn sure not serving the people that are indigenous to Atlanta so what you're having is people continually coming in to siphon resources and space in this hip cool city of Atlanta and betraying the people that have made it hip and cool it's kind of surreal to see all these people count African American music or rap meanwhile they're enforcing harsher and harsher sentences for even affiliation with the gang when most of our music culture is predicated on these same ideas right so there's so many of our folks that are set up to fail and end up living in prisons where they're just cheap labor for corporate interests at best if not dead as many of our folks have been so this is business as usual and there's just more and more space being made for white people to move in and take jobs that we have never set up the young black kids that grew up in Atlanta for and there's been no infrastructure to do that at the same time that we're living in a very white conservative state that's trying to erase anything that makes young white kids feel unculturable about historical racism and how it is that they ended up having so much more wealth like a city in America we don't have the agency to dictate our own curriculum about black people so once again to Briseida's point in regard to the need for better education and the means to educate our people and all of these things are very much tied to the interests of corporations that are trying to essentially erase black people off the face of the earth and having any agency except serving their interests when folks are really caring Thank you so much for that you've really eloquently drawn that tie between racial policing and racial capitalism and how it's already begun to transform the face of your city there in Atlanta so thank you so much for that Matthew Briseida if you'd like to respond to this question as well I'll just repeat it for you what are the political or economic interests of the country that are in the process of the aggression against the work that you're doing well what I am hearing from Matthew is what they're living through is what we live through very similar extractivist policies I think it's designed for the entire continent it doesn't change one bit what he says is that they don't have media outlets, they also don't have any media outlets here the media outlets are controlled by those who own this country, Ardila Lule the family and Santo Domingo family they own every single media in Colombia the land is the same those two families own most of the land it changed a bit because in the time of Pablo Escobar and Gacha you know these people made some agreements for the policy of justice and peace so they gave some land up some of that became part of the became owned by the political class so those are the famous size but it's basically the same thing the land is distributed by the same few families like the Santo Domingo family very sad to see that we see the same practices in different places exacting water land for us land is life for them land is just business it's just money that's what they basically just see a business but for us it's not like that for us it's our territory is our own life for us it's not an extractive business for indigenous and campofinos and black communities it's a way to resist and exist in our own territory because if we don't care for our mother earth there will be no life there will be no money that is useful if there's no water we won't even have air to breathe oxygen that is actually pure and what we want and I think Michael I think we have the same talk around education since we know there's an education since we know we have a sick education that has been imposed we want an education but an education that is allows us to think critically not to obey because here they impose an education to obey others not to think so we want an education that's why we've been fighting for education present from the theory but also practice and that's been one of the debate that we have one of our comrades that was working with us in that proposal he threatened him and he had to leave those of us who have been struggling for education we have death threats every couple of weeks because it's very easy to make war because they don't put their kids to the war their kids don't die in the war they have their own development supposedly of death and those who go to war are our children because it's our children who are uneducated and they're easy prey and that's something that we realize is that we have to build an education that is our own where our children we can take them to the river and show them how much value does this river have or this mountain or this earth but not in pesos but in terms of life and sustenance that's not what elites want and they don't forgive us for that because they have the land and they have the ecosystem for them is to produce money not to produce life thanks so much Briseida and that ties very nicely to our next question as you mentioned education as a form of resistance is there any other forms of resistance against this violence from multinationals from paramilitaries that you and your community are currently practicing and this question is also for you Matthew and your community what forms of resistance I know that you mentioned that you are having to find creative ways of resisting would you like to share some of these practices and forms of resistance that you all are practicing thanks well yes as I said what's really worked in regard to stopping the construction of these projects since September of 2021 is direct action in many facets so that's been people occupying the forest that has been people allegedly destroying equipment who knows how it happened all I know is that there were lots of tools that would have otherwise been used to destroy a forest that have found themselves sabotaged and despite us going through all of these democratic process it's only been these things that have been most effective and really just trying to get the word out now one of the major concerns that we have is the whole world's on fire so many of our folks are fatigued at the same time that they're being squeezed that they're just trying to make it out of people to take on such a struggle that's so all consuming in regards to the labor that it takes in order to sustain it right like occupations heavy work in order to sustain like that can be tough for a lot of folks so there are other ways to plug in and that comes down to calling up the commissioners the city council people and anybody else who has agency in regards to the legislative process zoning and the approval process but also making sure that we're dogging the hell out of any contractor that associates themselves with these projects right like there's this general idea that rich people have ingrained in our heads that everything's just business and then at the end of the day after they've made decisions to destroy people's neighborhoods and ways of life they should just be able to go home and have peace well we can't so neither can you and so we've had lots of people that have been showing up to folks houses showing up to people's offices if you're a contractor and this is not your only project then we're popping up at your other projects and so these are the ways that people have gotten very involved in making sure that at a certain point that a lot of contractors decide cop city isn't worth their time because what the Atlanta police foundation doesn't do is build so despite all the things that they might do to raise money in order to create this militarized police training facility they don't have a staff of builders or people that can create these things so those people that specialize in different facets of this project we need to make it clear that this isn't worth their time so that means make calls showing up to other work sites whatever we have to do to make sure that these people realize that cop city is not worth their time and the destruction of their reputation by associating themselves with it also stay tuned that's all I'll say we do have our week of action coming up March 4th through 11th here in Atlanta and we're setting up infrastructure among many players and we have to really my heart and words go out to the students that have really been showing up when it comes to the Atlanta University Center Morehouse, Spelman, Clark these students have been standing up in ways that are very difficult at these private institutions same thing at Emory and GSU anybody else who wants to pop up please do we have a lot of support from the faith community we've had a lot of support from just other folks and everybody in the media that's been supporting us God knows and we appreciate it the Daily Show that's supposed to be satire gave us the fairest and most honest coverage that I've seen of any major media help what does that say so I mean all of these things make a really big difference for those thanks Matthew what do you say that would you like to add a little bit more about the different ways that in Colombia you're in your community are practicing resistance against all of this that you guys have going against you in Colombia we've seen a lot of resistance we we think every struggle and we've seen struggles that have been going on for a long time like the peasant struggle or the great transformations that have been led by indigenous peoples who have been contributing a lot as well as black communities and with black communities the landowners enslaved them and began to enclose them and now they are workers on the same plantations and so sometimes they identify with the company that employs them and we think that because they work for the same people who are displayed but we see that there's a strong level of organization we've organized ourselves as peasants as campesinos even though it's not easy a lot of people have been killed a lot of people have been displaced but the resistance continues after what we lived through 48 plus years of a war with the park now we see a negotiation with the ELN another guerrilla and the confrontation continues through blocking roads marching demanding our rights every day there's also been people who have had to take up arms I don't justify it but honestly the way that these governments have been so brutal there hasn't been a lot of options I was one of the people who was against the park now that I'm a social leader and you have these death threats on you and you have nowhere to go and people are threatening your family what else can you do because they don't give you an opportunity for democratic means and now I understand and now I understand why there's so many armed groups in this country one because education as a fundamental pillar is not there because it's very difficult to defend your land from these forces a resistance that we've done every day along with solidarity organizations like you that continue to visualize our struggles even though you live in different countries with different ways you feel that we have to continue to struggle together and for us that's been a fundamental thing we also believe there is an opportunity today which I see that may be difficult because the minister of mining and energy in Colombia must end or must be transquant and all the multinationals and media companies have attacked her she's a woman so on top of that it's a young woman that's trying to do this transition but the minister of health is the same story and we've had conversations with them because we have to look at what hurts us the most which is education but you know there's a political models that are totally against it and what this government has not been able to do is to mobilize the media and what they should have is a media that is for the people and so everything gets distorted the media distorts everything that's going on and they use the media to terrorize people and infuse fear in people's minds we don't see things that things have changed since the peace accords many things change but we know that the resistance must continue that the peasant movement and the indigenous movement has to continue to drop and that makes us feel accompanied the collectivity has not disappeared yet we still resist together even though the peace agreement there was a reflection around the 50 years of war with the FARC they understood that something that could help resolve the conflict was distribution of land that didn't happen and so what people are doing is now resisting and taking land or recovering land that was stolen from peasants and indigenous people by armed groups they didn't take that peacefully they took it by force and so now we began to recover those lands because there's no other options even though the government is talking about distributing land it's not easy and we understand it we began the resistance of recovering land of retaking land from landowners because we understand that we need to protect the water in that our population is growing and we are damaging the environment and we have to see that if we damage our environment we won't have water and we'll have to leave our land and it's not easy because land that it's been producing sugar cane for decades which damages the soil and recovering that is not an easy process but we know it's not impossible thank you so much for that I love how your response is always so rooted in this idea of value as you say not in pesos but in life I'm going to stay with me after this call so taking a look at the time I think now I'd like to invite audience members to send in questions you can do that either by opening up the Q&A tab there at the bottom of your zoom screen or if you need to open up with the more option those three dots Q&A should be in there if you don't see it below so you can send in questions that way if you want to feel free to direct a question at one or both of our panelists and the discussion continues so we'll continue from here I think there's somebody with a raised hand TL Machia it's not right away visible to me but if that's something that you're able to do or maybe Issa yes are you able to talk the person that has the raised hand seems not to be the case at the moment for that person sorry if maybe you can try raising your hand again or you can go ahead and type it into the Q&A chat and that invitation is open to all of our participants as well if you have a question for either of our panelists if not I can end on another question as well I just want to make sure we have that space for audience questions I do see that raised hand now I wonder maybe if there's an issue with tapping maybe an interpretation channel or something like that that is making it hard to hear apologies if that's the case we'll make time for that as we continue or you can of course put it in the Q&A chat just to continue the conversation while we wait on that I have a question that I wanted to pose is for both of you if you could in an instant break through the walls that are built up around mainstream media and share a message I know there are so many probably but share a message with the community, with the nation with the world what would you want to make sure people know about the land defense that you're engaged in we must hold the line right this is the line this is not one of these times that liberals can convince themselves that the police are our friends and that they're going to use this facility to teach themselves not to be what the police have traditionally been need any evidence of what they're going to do here look at what they're doing they just told you my friend tortugita was killed they just told you what they're going to do with this land because they're showing you with how they're taking the land right it's not as if you just brutalize protesters that have done no hard to one police officer it's not as if you kill somebody who's a protestor and then once you have the land for yourself you say maybe we should reevaluate the strategy that we've used for policing in the past 300 years that's not what's going to happen so now is the important point where we begin to reevaluate how it is that we invest our money in this country why is it that we can only seem to find the will to increase money in violence any other if there was any other entity that was able to not to show any correlation in the money invested in them and the outcomes as policing is at the same time that we've raised the police budget in Atlanta the annual homicides have gone from 99 to 170 and now they want more money that's crazy and then nobody people talk about a raise in funding for police when there might be a spike in some form of crime but have you ever heard them talk about lowering how much they invest in police when crime goes down no this is a paranoiac response of people that are extracting as much wealth as possible and the actions being projected on us as violent because they know that we should be angrier than we are when we go thank you Matthew thank you for that but you say that to you as well if you could broadcast one message from the side of your activism your land defense what would you want to make sure everybody knows I think it would be that the community understands how important food is and food sovereignty for us it's very important to recover our seeds one of our great struggles that we are engaged in because many countries depend on GMO corn or GMO soy all these seeds are now they are monopolized by multination for us many of our indigenous varieties of potatoes have disappeared now we only have three and that's made us realize that we can't depend on our national that depending on them we must protect our seed to protect our lives the Monsanto that sells all the chemicals all the poisons and pesticides that we don't want to depend on them for us that's a resistance to tell Coca-Cola that Coca-Cola is at war with us so we don't drink Coca-Cola we've been resisting that coca leaf is ancestral and that with coca leaf you can make derivatives that are healthy that are medicinal that are medicinal we've changed the policy and saying showing that we can do it's a fundamental thing to understand that agroecology is a very important aspect of our policy recovering seeds growing them with our own hands for those who profit from GMO seed won't be in favor of that for them that's a big business for them and we've been resisting that lands that are now we've liberated them and recovered them through struggle now we understand we have to use our own fertilizer and we can make them ourselves we don't have to buy it from them for us the river plays an important role as a supporter of life so what do we need as an education for life for critical thinking that means we need more people to be educated more people that can learn from the river we can have a foundation that leaves the four walls of the classroom and can go in and understand everything that they have and everything that can be lost if we continue down this path of endless consumption the pandemic was a fundamental thing I don't know if in the US was similar but here in Colombia we understood we all had to contribute to the the planet we all needed to have on our land we needed something to consume something to eat because if they restricted our mobility we couldn't eat and they're throwing so many chemicals on these foods so we we can't continue to consume Coca-Cola we can't continue to consume canned food we have to start to see our food as a fundamental aspect of our life it's been very important for us and has been a big challenge that that education that has made the difference because the Colombian peasantry does not have formal studies most people have not finished their high school and university it's very difficult for us to access that because everything's been privatized so when they talk about these things the complex and for a lot of people that leads to a lot of social leaders are not able to tell their story and they are left like martyrs dead and that's why I want all of us to unite and show that there's many of us who are resisting and we think that's a fundamental part that take back what they've taken from us and recover everything that they've taken not consume what they produce that will be a catastrophe for them the economies work if people consume it so we have to have our own supply and that for us is very important one of the biggest challenges for us is we've had to look everywhere to build a school and to start to make people feel that it's possible because when they aren't educated they feel they can't ask for their rights but when they are educated they feel like they can learn and they can learn the struggle and I think it's important it's a struggle for all of us to take on so much Briseza and Matthew it's been such an honor such a pleasure to bring you two together for this amazing conversation and make these connections that really connect the struggle across borders it's not Briseza said it very well what Matthew and Indigenous and Black communities are experiencing here and the US is very similar to what communities are experiencing in Colombia so it's really important that us as allies who are witnessing this who are also here in the belly of the beast the people here in the US the people in Canada that we really work in solidarity with the people on the ground who are actually doing the really hard work of being on the ground of educating of protecting feeds of resisting through food sovereignty through education through your own education instead of the one that's been imposed on all of us so I'm really grateful for your words for your wisdom and I hope that we can continue having more conversations like this because it's so important to bring people together so we don't feel so alone in the struggle I'm part of the Latin America team here at Coat Pink we are having an event in April to talk about these issues at one of these really big institutions here in the US at American University we will be holding a forum to talk about the types of policies that we want our government here in the US to be crafting for a more just Latin America because we understand that a lot of the inequality a lot of the migration crisis have been created by the US so we need to actually start fixing those policies and as this year is the 200th anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine we need to say more intervention in Latin America and let the people of Latin America chart their own path we there are so many more people like Briseida who actually have an idea in the solution and this is not just from Briseida but this is from communities and this is from centuries of knowledge and wisdom that has been passed down policies that actually go along with what we need what we need is like food sovereignty we need clean air to breathe we need clean water to drink and that these policies respect our mother earth so I'm absolutely so grateful for your work Matthew for your work Briseida and for everyone here who's been on this panel and we'll be sure to put this webinar on YouTube so that everyone can share it and re-watch it I'm going to re-watch it because it's just so many amazing ideas and exchanges have happened here so thank you so much I just want to say thank you and for well as well Briseida and Matthew wishing you so much strength love and solidarity for your struggles and your continued efforts to educate both your own communities and folks like us who are not there on the ground with you thank you so much to our interpreter Evan for a really wonderful job interpreting Briseida's responses to ISAR host as well with that concludes our webinar thank you everyone for attending and yes as Sam has said we will have this recording up on YouTube to re-watch and to share widely so thank you everyone so much and have a great evening