 Hello, hello, hello and welcome. My name is Meron Khalili and this is a DMTV frontline interview. And today I'm talking with Esteban Cervat. He's a scientist, he's an environmental activist, and he's the founder of EcoLeaks, which you can imagine what that is by the name. And he's also a campaigner with the Depth for Climate Campaign. He's got a fascinating story. Esteban, welcome. Good to see you. How are you doing? You're speaking to us now from Munich, just ahead of the G7 summit where you're there for some, let's say activist projects. How's it going over there? What's the vibe? Good. Things are very intense right now. We're planning a global action to hold the G7 accountable for their climate debt. You know, they're meeting here near Munich next Monday and Tuesday, so we have actions in more than 30 countries and there's a lot going on. Okay, as we record, I mean, we're recording now on Thursday, 23rd of June. Esteban, I know that we don't have much time, so let's just jump straight into it. Can you tell us who are you and what do you do? Give us your background. Sure. I'm a scientist from Argentina, but I spent 10 years of my life in the belly of the beast working in the Silicon Valley in California for some of the biggest multinational health companies in vaccine development and Indianology. And after that, I realized I was very young and I realized, you know, all of that was just not helping any of the diseases that we have in the Global South, in Latin America, we have Chagas, Malaria, Leshmania. All these corporations are only there to make money and not for what they claim to, which is human health. So I did my master's study there and I worked for nearly 10 years and then I went back to Argentina with the idea to start an eco project, a community, a sustainable community project that I also had in mind for many years. And that's the reason I moved to this area called Mendoza Province. It's a wine, beautiful wine region that I moved there because after traveling the northwest of Argentina, I noticed I went to see the devastation caused by mega mining that is really destroying our country and our planet for mining for gold and silver, you know, blowing up the mountain tops and using an enormous amount of water and contaminating that with cyanide, mercury, sulfuric acid and so on. And I saw the devastation firsthand, but I learned that Mendoza was an exception to the rule because in 2007, the people massively mobilized to the streets and blocked the roads and stayed there for a long time until they achieved a law banning the use of mega mining in Mendoza and the reason is this is a desert. The province is a desert, very little water. So people have it in their DNA, their awareness to defend that water, the value of water. So I settled there because I wanted to be in a place where people understood the value and the need to fight for the environment when it was threatened. So although it was kind of a very, I mean, there's a relatively low literacy rate, I believe in this area, but it was a base of activism where people had successfully fought off the establishment and got mining banned. Yeah, I think it's a lesson to many progressives that, you know, there's a lot of academics, there's a lot of highly intellectual people in the progressive world and it's really humbling when you go to a place in rural Argentina or rural anywhere that fights for their environment and defense, their water and has, is in the front lines. And it really teaches you that whatever, however many books you have read, however many libraries you have at home, however enlightened you may feel, these people that are not illiterate but they're not necessarily, of course they're not highly educated because there's not a lot of universities. So they usually have the secondary school degree and that's it. And that those people have a lot to teach you. Those people, even though they are not activists, they are not necessarily progressive. They are rural family value, you know, farm farmers and so on, but they have such awareness and consciousness on the importance of water, but it's really, it's really touching and the way that a mass movement can be built with these people is extremely powerful. I think it has a lot to teach to, to activists in the global North that have so many filters to become an activist, you must be one of these things. Sometimes I think we need to be the ones that put ourselves at the service of the frontliners of the world, even though they may not be progressive, they may not even have had a chance to read all these books or to go to university, but we should be the ones taking the step of greatness and generosity and the, letting the hand to put ourselves at the service It's nice to hear you say that. I mean, there's so much bullshit in leftist circles, left on left violence and these people, it seems to be really about survival and they did what they needed to do. So it's very heartwarming to hear you, to hear you say that. And I wonder, I mean, maybe just as a parenthesis, what would you say could be learned if there are lessons from that successful activism in rural Argentina in 2007? If you could speak to all the leftist activists in the global North and tell them something about what they should be doing better or what they should avoid doing, what would it be? I think at the root of it all is a paradigm shift that we are not the enlightened ones, that you in Europe are not the center of the world that we need to break out of Eurocentrism. Right now the world is upside down and the European activists with a lot of good intentions are trying to pave the way for climate action and for the future of the world, but maybe it's the other way around. Maybe it's the frontliners of the world, especially in the global south that have a lot of answers and the answers are not necessarily ideological or theoretical, but they're very concrete, which is defending our water. Get the fuck out of our land, you know? Just you want to do something, you want to make a revolution, get shale out of our land, get BP, get a winter sal and total out of our territories. If you're in France or in Belgium or in England, there's plenty of work to do and it's not necessarily finding theoretical answers which are also necessary, but sometimes the theory is built as you go and the theory will come from the frontlines and from the changes that can be made, achieving something. Right now we're achieving nothing and getting lost in these spiraling debates about what is the perfect world that we need, but we're not doing... We're not achieving anything along the way to get there and the frontliners are very practical and they are achieving goals to save your water, to save your land. We really need a paradigm shift and, you know, turn things upside down and start listening to the people that are suffering, the most affected people and areas of the world. Well, thanks for that. Okay, I mean, back to yours on a timeline as it was. 2018, Eco Sewer, which was your eco project in Mendoza in rural Argentina, it was two years old and then there was an announcement which changed the situation somewhat for you. Tell us about what happened. Yeah, unfortunately Mendoza happened to be part of Vacamorta. Vacamorta is the world's second largest shale gas basin and fourth largest shale oil basin. It's about the size of Belgium and it's a huge carbon bomb for the planet that is exploited through fracking. Fracking is an extremely contaminating technique that for that reason is banned in much of Europe, yet it is the very multinational companies from those Western European countries such as BP, Shell, Dotal, Absol, Mendoza, Equinor and others that are leading the fracking operations in Vacamorta and beyond. Fracking is also a leading cause of methane emissions for the planet which is completely suicidal at a time when the IPCC and even the leading countries of the world are signed in this global methane pledge at COP last year and they're doing the exact opposite by expanding fracking. So at the end of 2017, fracking was introduced in Mendoza and there are a lot of silence. The biggest media group of Mendoza province were the same owners as the owners of the fracking company and this is owned by two businessmen. One of them, they're so powerful. They own most of Argentina's companies and all kinds of things, media, energy and so on. And one of them now I think lives in Switzerland. He's so powerful that his name was in the Jeffrey Epstein's Lists of Lights, you know, with the president's... A little black book. Yeah, and he uses his mafia contacts and political contacts to basically open up Argentina for multinational companies to extract and destroy the country and exploit it. So this is what we were confronting and the media, as I said, were completely silent. The government brought fracking unconstitutionally through an executive order of the governor. The governor, just to paint you a full picture, was the most powerful in the country and was a key ally of Macri in building the right wing coalition Cambiemos that was governing at the time. The governor was at the same time the president at a national level of this conservative party called UCR, that was the key ally of Macri. So it was not just any governor, but by far the most powerful in Argentina. And when fracking was introduced, the governor and the mayor in my city and many other officials at the time were the same people that 10 years earlier in 2007 had championed the fight against mining. In a province that is a desert fighting for the water translates into winning elections. And these people did that and used it masterfully. So, but by the time they were elected, they had no problem to betray everyone and throw their commitments off the window and bring fracking through an illegal executive order. So at the end of 2017, the first few wells of fracking were installed in Mendoza. But not everyone wanted to go down in history as a traitor to the people. And there were people that I had gotten to know in the government, in technical positions in government offices who really were very proud of their history to defend the water. And one of these offices was the one that was the role was to be vigilant for the safety of the water of Mendoza. Water is so important that it has its own institution called the irrigation department. And they also do tests on water to control the quality, to control contamination and so on. So a whistleblower from this agency reached out to me and told me that the government had run a test on the first wells of fracking and the results were really bad. They were already contaminating the water table. They also were planning, they were hiding this report. They withheld it from the view of the public during the public hearing that decided the future of fracking and they were planning to replace the results with fake numbers that were going to be obtained at a university lab where the vice dean was at the same time a representative of the fracking company. A whistleblower reaches out to you. I don't want to go too deep into this because of course we must respect the anonymity of your source but how did that happen? Was that just good fortune that somebody called you Esteban at this eco community and said, hey, I've got this report which proves that the government are lying about fracking or was there another kind of process? I'm trying to understand for other people that may be in the same position what you did and how that might help to direct perhaps their own actions. Well, to tell you the story short, Mendoza is a big province. It's a big area with low population density and not many, you know, there is far apart towns and cities and the one I chose to settle in is a relatively small city. I was in the farmland in the middle of nowhere but the closest city was Hederal Alviar a 30,000 people town city and it just so happened that the capital of the direction of the presidency of the irrigation department of the province was based in Alviar and so that's where all of the studies were being managed and I just happened to during the years that I was there and I was becoming friends. You know, this is a small town and environmentally befriend other environmentally. So I held a lot of these people in a lot of in a high place. I always told them that it was because of them that I came to Mendoza because of the fight that they championed 10 years earlier and this became my friends. So some of them betrayed the cause when some of them didn't and some of the contacts I had led me to also, you know, in a town like that it's hard not to find out things. It's hard to keep things secret. The easiest way to get something to be known by everyone is to tell someone, hey, don't tell anyone. I'll tell you a secret. Don't tell anyone. So eventually the news this was so loaded that it reached me and I set off to try to contact the original source and to get the report. It was not easy. It took time. It took a lot of efforts that I cannot explain to you right now, but we finally got that report and instead of a revolt that is still going in Mendoza. Okay. Okay. So what did you do then? I mean, you're in possession of this bombshell report that proves the government's lied about the damage that fracking is going to do to the region's water. What do you do now? How do you publicize this? So for me, Julian Assange was a very influential person in my life. You know, when WikiLeaks started, I remember, I saw this revolutionary potential in WikiLeaks and what they were doing. So it always just stayed with me the potential, the power of leaking documents that should be public but have been censored. So when we had this report, we thought, well, why don't we create a platform that could be, of course, not have the technology of WikiLeaks or anything like that. Just a simple website and a Facebook page because everyone uses Facebook in Mendoza just to help make this go viral. So that's what we did. We made EqualLeaks as a platform that could do environmental information leaks and publishing. And we started basically, we needed that to have a platform on which to publish the report. And that's what we did on March 16th or 18th of 2018. And then it set up a huge wave of revolts but also persecution and death threats against myself and many other activists. Whoa, hold on. So from what period? I mean, what was the timeline there between you posting that report on Facebook and creating EqualLeaks? I think something you've termed in another interview as a low-tech WikiLeaks. And the government responding to that because what would often happen with many activists if they got this report like this, it might be posted somewhere and then nobody really shares it and that's the end of it. How do you make sure that it gets on the radar of the government and on everybody else's radar whose future would be jeopardized by fracking? Yeah, initially that was my feeling as well that I would just publish this and it would just be a bombshell and lead to revolts and nothing else would need to be done. But it doesn't work like that. So I don't come from journalism. I come from science. So I have no clue how any of these stuff worked. I just thought, okay, you leak something that is true and people will look at it and they will understand it and they will take action or even the NGOs or the institutions that are supposed to be responsible for all of these things but they were nowhere to be found. So the reaction was silence and I had to put my face behind it to start defending and championing and pushing for this to get talked about. And that's why it got talked about but also it had a huge cost on me. And how did that feel? I mean, that must have been a little bit... I must have made you feel pretty nervous doing that. I mean, everyone knows where to find you. You're in a continent, Latin America with the highest number of assassinations of environmental defenders in the last 15 years. How did you feel putting your face to this document? To tell you the truth, the day I had to publish the report that as soon as I got it, I needed to get it out of my hands. We didn't have internet in the farm. There was no connection. The connection was down. So I had to drive to the city. And this is a small city. Everyone was sleeping the siesta in the afternoon. Everything is closed. There was only one little ice cream shop that was open and had pretty bad Wi-Fi but I was sitting in this ice cream shop and I published the report from there. And frankly, when I published it, I felt you might as well be committing suicide because I knew I was going into a very dark territory of huge interests that are beyond my control. The government, these multinationals, the media, the mafia, these two businessmen have killed people in the past and anyone that opposes them is gone. So that's what I felt. But also I felt there was no option if I would be to lie to myself. Fracking was not only going to destroy our little project. That was just in the beginning stages but it will destroy everything else. And it's also part of Acomorta which is destroying our own country. So for me, I didn't have a choice. Otherwise, I'd have to lie to myself and look the other way and pretend nothing is happening. Let me drill down a little bit on those tactics. I mean, you uploaded to Facebook. You've got your face behind it. But there were also some media interviews, some radio interviews that you did, I think with some local outlets that helped to amplify this message and put it on the radar. Tell us a little bit about those. Yeah, so the first thing that happened, I published it on a Friday and the weird thing happened the next day was a Saturday and not a working day, right? And yet all the official government websites like mentosa.gov, irrigation.gov.r All of these official bodies that are not working on a Saturday went out to publish a report that was contradicting our publication without mentioning us. They were trying to, you know, first they tried to ignore you and make you invisible. So basically they were trying to overlap our news with some fake news. The title was the results from fracking are in and everything is clean. It was so obviously a negation of our publication and the big media were also doing the same. So that's when I understood that unless I would come out and put my face and put my voice behind this, nothing would really happen. It would just get buried. It was just the report was four pages of numbers with a signature and people, as you said, they are not, you know, none of them, a lot of them are not university educated. They're not engineers. They're not scientists. So for them, it's like, oh, what, what, what do we know? This is just could be just fake. Also, keep in mind, we know what equal leaks means the moment you hear it, but in Argentina and rural Argentina, many didn't have a clue what that meant. They were like, what does echo legs mean? You know, reading it in Spanish. So it took a lot of educational effort, communication, a lot of effort to explain how that was connected inspired by wiki leaks and what that means. And what I did, I managed to get a couple of interviews in really small local radios. The town that I was living in was at the forefront of the fight against mining 10 years earlier because it's probably one of the most affected. It's really one of the first on the frontlines of water scarcity. So the popular support for anything to defend water is overwhelming and that's why I was there. So when a couple of radios that had continued this line of fighting and defending the water, I heard of it and I contacted them. These are really small radios. So it was really easy for me to go there and speak, not easy for them though, because they were taking a big chance. The government was really repressive and really could cut down your funding and anything. So they are taking big risks, but they did the interviews and we recorded that and we shared that on YouTube or Facebook and on WhatsApp. We started sharing their WhatsApp and then started to spread and politicians in Argentina are so discredited that when people began to hear a scientist speaking, they were much more likely to believe a scientist than they were to believe the mayor of their own city and then the government started to get nervous and they started to make mistakes. They started to contradict one another. First they said the report was fake and totally unfounded. Then others were saying it was true but it was incomplete and being misinterpreted. And then the different ones in different places of the province, there were different officials in different towns, they began to have declarations to the media that were all contradicting one another. So we exploited their contradictions to start to show to the public how they were actually lying to them and that worked very well and they got more and more nervous and a couple of weeks into all of this, I got a call from the other major newspaper, the biggest newspaper of the province which is in competition with the biggest media group that I was telling you about. And I don't know. Whose owner was behind the fracking? Yes, yes. And this other one is not, they're not angels. They may, maybe they were just left out of the business or whatever and they wanted to hurt their competitor, rival mafia guys. So they, a well-meaning journalist contacted me. He sounded very honest and he sounded like he was interested in this for the right reasons. But then I didn't know all of what I know now, who owned what and what was, you know, this is something that on high insight I can explain to you, but back then I was just a scientist trying to build an eco village. You know, I didn't care about who owned what media or what was this political wars going on. So this journalist from the biggest newspaper of the province contacted me and interviewed me. And the breaking, the breakthrough came when he published that he also did the work of contacting the lab where the study had been conducted. And there was a signature on that report. So he verified with the director of the lab that this was her signature and that this report was true and genuine. Although she could not say what it was about because these studies are conducted in a blinded or double blinded fashion. So, but she verified that the numbers were correct, that that was her signature and that the study came from that place. So that was enough to just throw out the window all of what the government has been trying to say. And because of the outlet who published it was the biggest in the province, it really blew the shed out of the roof. And then we started having a lot of mass mobilizations that were already building, the momentum was building, the tension was building because let alone the contamination, keep in mind that the betrayal that people felt that the same people that they voted for to defend the water were the same will train them behind their back bringing fracking that is as bad as mega mining. Tell me a little bit about the mass mobilizations that you were just about to talk about. I mean, how's the, you know, that trance as soon as everybody found out about the report and the damage that fracking cause, they put into practice the same activist networks, the same capacity to mobilize as they had a decade before against mining. I mean, how did that work and how did they suddenly show up in the streets and managed to create a real response? It was even more complex because the governor and the mayor and all these officials they were coming from, they were some of the visible heads of the fight against mining and they had all the contacts and the connections with the climate activists from 10 years earlier so as to buy them to neutralize them or to demobilize them. So we not only had to fight the companies, the media, the weaponized justice system and all the other things but also some of the old structures of activism that were totally bought and co-opted to neutralize the struggle. But the struggle became so powerful because it sprouted from the people. It was really a mass movement emerging from that, from their memory, the public memory of the struggle 10 years earlier that had been built up for many years together with a new generation of land defenders, water defenders that came to the streets and it just had so much power. We mobilized 15,000 in my town in one demo out of a population of 30,000. So 50% of the people on the streets, of course, you never heard of it because the media of the Global North don't share these stories. But we, and that was just one town but we had tens and tens of thousands of people all over the province. It became the largest movement against fracking in Argentina's history. And later I know I learned when you put it into context in perspective it's the biggest in the world. You've never seen 50,000 and 100,000 people mobilizing against fracking anywhere in the world and it's really a mass movement. It doesn't have an organization or a leadership that is organized but it's actually the people defending the water when we call upon them to mobilize they're ready to mobilize to try to ban fracking which in this case they didn't allow us. We were, you know, keeping in mind we were messing with the world's second largest shale gas basin and fourth largest shale oil basin. Behind the governor was President Macri. Behind Macri was President Trump who was the real, you know, he was pushing for the fracking industry to expand everywhere and Mendoza was simply the new frontier. The G20 met in Argentina that year with a specific goal of discussing the advance of fracking and you can still find the treats from Rick Perry, the energy secretary of Trump who was coming from Texas, the birthplace of fracking. He actually said, you know, Argentina has a huge potential in the shale of Bacamorta. We're here to help expand that. In fact, they sent a delegation of the Sherpas of the G20 actually met in Mendoza to discuss all these things. So that's what we're up against. And if we were to be successful banning fracking in Mendoza which seven law drafts by different parties were introduced for the banning of fracking because it was such a powerful movement at the time. But if we were to be successful in that we will deal a death blow to Bacamorta because we would inspire the neighboring provinces that have suffered it for many more years than Mendoza to show them that it's possible and together we could actually ban fracking there. Keep in mind also, this is so strategically important that the U.S. is building a military base in the heart of Bacamorta under the guise of humanitarian aid that nobody needs there. The only humanitarian crisis there is fracking. So there's no war, there's no civil war, anything like that. But it's just that Bacamorta is the next frontier after the U.S. depletes its own shale reserves. Bacamorta will be the next source for decades to come of gas and oil for fracking. But behind all of this are companies from Europe, right? I mean, a lot of the products are coming to Europe. Which companies are these companies? They're headquartered in many of them in northern Europe where you are right now. Yeah, the biggest holders, there's European and American companies. Of course, there's Exxon and Chevron, but from Europe you have BP from England, Shell, which is now based in England. Repsol had found the basin and then had lost it because of the country nationalized, the company that Repsol was the most. YPF is the national oil company, but Repsol played a big role. Total is a huge player. They are contaminating the, they've been found to have open pits of disgusting, you know, contaminating material, violating all the environmental laws. Wintersal from Germany, the biggest oil and gas company of Germany that nobody knows about. It's also one of the biggest players. Equinor from Norway, which is a publicly owned state owned company that is from a supposedly progressive government and green friendly government in Norway. They are leading the destruction in Bacavarta. Those are some of the European companies and those are the ones that we've been focusing on since I arrived here three years ago. To really put the pressure to stop them from fracking on the other side of the world and to stop the import of those products here. Here being Berlin, Europe, well, Europe or Germany where you are now. So you're really putting your finger in the eye of some really big powers here. Tell me how they reacted and what sort of things that they did in order to intimidate you and your colleagues. So the preferred method there is to create, fabricate criminal cases. Since they fully control the legal system and some people still believe in the legal system, that's how they use that to in a way discredit you at the same time as scare you. And just criminal cases began to rain down on me and later on others who were becoming annoying to the people, the government because the movement multiplied everywhere. But clearly I was one of the most visible faces. So I was a main target of attack because if they could prove me wrong or if they could force me to say, to pull back, you know, to say that it was a mistake or something, so the first criminal case came from no other than the mayor of my city, fully supported by the governor and the president. He was just being the frontman of carrying this case against me. So the most powerful guy of the city was filing a legal case against me, trying to make me to pull back from saying that he was part in this hiding of this report which he was a key player in hiding that and so on. But at the time, you know, with no resources and no money and no power other than a simple website, we managed to defeat them in several of these cases by calling on the people to mobilize in our support. What cases? What were you alleged to have done? So there's many. Then they accused me of drug trafficking. They planted drugs in our farm. They sent people to occupy a part of the farm with forged documents that gave them some kind of ownership, some title from being the heirs of someone who lived there a hundred years earlier. A lot of cases like that. I'm also indicted on public intimidation, which is accusing me of causing panic in the people. And that's why they were mobilizing for saying something false when it's all I was saying is a scientific truth of why trafficking is bad and many, many other legal cases and media media operations that you can find about me accusing us of all kinds of things. There's no fair. That's like Assange law fair. Yeah, no fair at the, you know, not as a precedent level, but that's what they use against activists before they murder you. They use the law fair to try to shut you down. And because I knew this was the, the, the dynamics of the system, maybe I was crazy to do this, but everything they threw at me, I threw it back 10,000 times bigger. So I made a much bigger deals because I knew that the whole goal of this was to intimidate us and by making an example of people like me, they would force everyone else to get scared. So how do you throw it back a hundred times bigger? They've got the megaphone. They've got the authority, the expertise. You don't, I mean, you found lawyers. How do you do that? What was the, the case became well known enough that some lawyers volunteer to help us because I also didn't have money to be wasting and spending on so much legal stuff. And I asked my lawyer with the first case that was with the mayor. I said, how on earth could we possibly defeat this man when the legal system is fully behind him? Even if we present all the evidence, they're going to, to the side of his favor, I'm going to go to jail. And the lawyer said, well, the only way would be if he doesn't show up for the public hearing where he and I were supposed to face off. The mayor, yeah, the mayor. And that's supposed to be like a conciliatory meeting where the parties are supposed to face off and say, I'll see if we can settle something. And of course, the mayor was expecting that I would come on my knees and say, sorry, sir. You know, I was wrong. You know, I didn't mean to say that you were part of that and maybe I made a mistake or something because he knew I would be thrown in jail. But I just did the exact opposite. I said, well, I know a way how to make him not come to the hearing, which is to call on the people because by then he was so afraid of his own people. He was just right after we mobilized 15,000, you know that those 15,000 mobilized at a time where there was a national event happening in this town that happens once a year, the most important event. Sometimes the president comes, the governor and many high level officials come and it was the first time in the history of the town over a hundred years that the mayor did not show up to the event because he was afraid of us, of the people. It was right after I made it to a national media we were able to be seen by millions of people. So we got the stuff out of the censorship of Mendoza borders. And so I knew that it was a weak point for him at that time. So I just went on Facebook and on the social media and I say, you know, on Tuesday we have or I don't remember the day but there is this public hearing and if the mayor doesn't show up, we win the case and we deal them a major blow. So I call on all the people to come and a lot of people came from the town and the mayor didn't show up. And so he lost the case and he had to present his resignation to the case which was really, really shamefully written and humiliating for himself. And he said, as a mayor of the city I have really important things to do and I don't have time to continue this case but you started the case. These were all things that helped fuel the fire and make people feel excited and that we have a chance to win it if we are smarter than we get together. Okay. I mean, that's your response to the lawfare that they were raining down upon you, as you said but also the death threats and some of the more underground ways that they were threatening you and others. Tell us a little bit about that and how that made you feel because you seem to be pretty hard on all this stuff and I know many activists that might go, look, this is not worth it. I can't deal with this. I'm jeopardizing my future or at some point I'm jeopardizing my well-being. So tell me about that and why you think you reacted in the way that you reacted. Yeah, clearly it wasn't as wise as maybe I should have been because I had to leave afterwards. Sooner or later you up the game until you can no longer up the game anymore when they started to threaten my family. I was already getting threats and veal threats through people letting me know that things would happen to me but then in 2019 after a full year of very intense fighting and persecution and things when people went put in jail other people had to go into exile into other provinces or to the capital of Buenos Aires and at the end of 2018 the governor approved a code of conduct that was criminalizing protests like we had in the 70s during the dictatorship. So it all helped weaken and scare the people and the movement. And in my case in 2019 I managed to turn around a couple of the criminal cases that they have fabricated against me. One of them was the one I just told you about. I just, I returned the favor to the mayor by filing a criminal case against him because what he did was the forge, you know he fabricated an argument that was false and that's a crime. So we returned the favor at a time when he was running for re-election. 2019 was an election here and that's when really it hurt them and they started to threaten my family my girlfriend and they told me that my girlfriend was going to suffer most of the consequences for my actions as long as I could feel the power of the people on the streets I felt safe, I felt, well I didn't feel safe but I felt it was whatever happened was worth it because we were building a revolution and as long as, as soon as they were able to start debilitating that it's different anything that could happen to you maybe people are too afraid to defend anyone anymore or to mobilize anymore. Also, I had inside their information that they were planning something hard against me to put me in jail and the characters probably murdered me inside of jail you know with a knife attack or something and say that I was you know they were trying to accuse me of violence so once you're in jail they could just say well yeah we told you he was violent he got in the fight and they stuck into death and the media is not going to go there to find out what really happened they don't even care to report what happens outside. So these were the conditions upon which you know dying for this cause it was not a problem if it was worth it if it could help lead to a victory but knowing that dying for the sake of dying it was not the best idea and also when my girlfriend could be assassinated or raped or anything else could happen to her and I didn't have the right to keep putting her and my family in this situation and that's why I decided to come here but also to keep hitting them as soon as I came to Europe and what I did is just to start throwing missiles at them from the first world from Europe and just try to mobilize the climate movement try to embrace awareness and we have done such great global actions that a lot of people in Europe in the climate movements are talking about fracking even before the gas crisis with Russia and there's a lot of awareness that fracking has to end and we are getting there and I think globally we'll be able to bring it to an end which we wouldn't be able to do unless we were able to have impact in Europe as well Tell me a bit about the Debt for Climate campaign which your activist energy is now going towards I mean right now as we said you're in Munich for the G7 and you'll be campaigning and protesting for the Debt for Climate campaign there how did that get kicked off and what are the goals of that campaign? Yeah so we've been doing huge actions Germany and the Gelende the biggest mass movement in Germany is now an anti-fracking, anti-gas movement and we've built a global coalition called Schell-Massfall inspired and with Schell-Massfall and brought together a lot of groups around the world and frontliners and last year we did the biggest global action against fracking in history and this year we'll do it again in Novos but also in the meantime we've been doing a lot of actions and visibilizing the frontlines of the Global South and Bacchamorta in the centers of power because I think that's the way to go but also we realized that behind the advance of fracking the advance of mining and offshore drilling and deforestation and so many other things in the Global South there is a common denominator which is Debt Debt is a burden on the neck of the Global South as soon as we became independent from Spain in Latin America we went right into becoming a neo-colony of Britain and this was done through loans that were unfayable that had huge interest rates and this debt this is mostly illegitimate obvious debt that forces the Global South to keep paying back just the interest for that they need to continue the deforestation advance the fossil fuel industry as well and over the years of me working with groups Fridays for Future Finch of Rebellion and the Gelenda all the climate groups around Europe and globally I become more and more convinced that unless we have the workers you know we need the working class of the world and we need the worker unions of the world to be united in this fight and nobody seems to be able to do that and of course we know that climate change is not one of their immediate needs they are focused on a lot more urgent needs for food and jobs and so on but when we connect debt and climate we are able to start building that bridge at an unprecedented global scale and I'm not talking about the labor unions of Europe yet but the labor unions of the Global South really understand the need to cancel the debt that is burning in their future and their present and for generations to come so when you go to the worker unions of the Global South and you tell them we are building a campaign to cancel the debt of the Global South and be able to take climate action to relieve our countries of this debt that also prevents us from being able to achieve any climate goal and a just transition and leading fossil fuels in the ground the Global North continues, you know they talk a lot of nice stuff but in reality they are fueling this and the IMF, the World Bank this is the G7, this is the top 1% of the world that is controlling us concentrated power and financial power that is destroying the planet and groups more responsible for the climate crisis otherwise meeting here near Munich next Monday and Tuesday so we realize that with this is what we can build strong enough and broad and powerful enough global coalition of forces that brings together labor movements climate movements and social movements at an unprecedented scale to demand debt cancellation for climate action so that then in a decentralized fashion each country of the Global South can have a chance to find their own way decide their own future and find a just transition with the money that otherwise would be going to pay these obvious debts so that's where it's connected and we're just fighting like fracking mining and so on and we continue the fracking fight but we also understood that we need to go a level higher in order to be able to bring enough groups together that otherwise just on fracking or mining we only have the small assemblies and frontline communities and activists here it's just not enough power and it's not a matter of science or truth anymore we have the truth we have the science and our overwhelmingly on our side but it's a matter of power how can we build enough power on the streets to start evening the unbalance the disbalance of power to force any of these actions to be taken and that's what we are doing with that for climate interesting and how how has the response been from other environmental groups and activists because this is a different a different take on climate activism that you're proposing what's the level of support that you've managed to to get so far with this? It's amazing it's by far the biggest and most exciting action that I have been part of and it's a little bit it's building up from the networks of solidarity that we have been building over the last three years doing actions in global solidarity many of the same networks are behind championing this campaign and it's just built and included so many new different groups that would otherwise not be part of this unless we were connecting death and climate you can see in one Zoom call with 60 people from 40 countries all over the world with trilingual translation the diversity from indigenous people to actually we have a union of Argentinian workers the judges a union that has all the judges together they're interested in joining and I'm sure many of those judges are the ones that contributed me three years ago so I want to ask them to cancel my cases as well but the diversity is so broad and that's our power the groups that don't normally belong together are coming together and even though they don't agree on everything they barely can agree on anything they agree on death for climate and that's what we need to do bring those groups together to have enough power and how can people learn more about the death for climate campaign? so we have a website that is deathforclimate.org and on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook it's the same handle as death for climate and we're getting really active it's getting really intense in the next few days so you can look up for a lot of material coming up for more than 45 actions in more than 30 countries there's going to be mass mobilizations in Argentina that are being led by the workers there's going to be disruptive actions in the centers of power of Europe which is where the role of people in Europe is the power is to help amplify and hit the IMF, the World Bank in Paris, in Brussels, in London, in Munich and so on in Washington DC they are mobilizing as well so that our mobilizations are no longer invisible but they are coordinated from Sri Lanka to South Africa from Indonesia to Argentina coming together and being amplified and visibilized behind a common call together globally where they can no longer avoid that and it's not the end but the beginning this is just the beginning and it's when we give birth on the streets to this movement that we have been working on for more than half a year and then we have to go to our cop to be stronger to put this on the agenda, to force this on the official agenda and make stronger, stronger mobilizations over time it's a long term campaign, a long term vision it may take years and we know we are confronting the most concentrated power in the world in an unprecedented fashion that they have never been confronted with by bringing climate, labor and social movements together so we expect, just like I was telling you my personal story this may be a thousand times harder just like they did to us in Argentina the same kind of operations would happen globally now but this also needs to be done and if we are millions it would be harder for them to put us down But you've got a lot of experience now and you can pour that into the debt for climate campaign like a lot of experience on the front line as the persona non grata of the establishment being threatened and having to live now in exile Okay, let me bring it back to you because I'm conscious of time and I know you have to leave us soon Can you summarize why you do all this? Where does your personal motivation come from here? Not just the political goals but you as a person, why are you up to all of this? Well, you know, for me the US had a huge impact in my life I never liked the US I always knew what the US was and as Jose Martí, a Cuban revolutionary poet from the 19th century, said he also had lived in the US and he said, I have lived in the beast and I know it's vowels or it's vowels So I also, you know, the rottenness of consumerism and capitalism and individualism and all of the things that are plaguing the world today and leading us to the climate disaster are nowhere better expressed than in the US society and the US system and after being in there, trying to make money to go back home to do something meaningful it was kind of a sacrifice, a self-imposed you know, just trying to make as much money as I could so I could go back and do something that was actually I felt worth it for me and for the world and I feel, you know, there's no career for me to make there's nothing for me to gain you know, we are in this world for a short period of time we may be gone tomorrow and we are living in the most critical time in human history facing the biggest threat and crisis in the history of our species and there is nothing else that I could be doing other than fighting this fight however long and whatever it may take Thank you for that and let me finish with a question I'd like to ask all the people we speak to on the front line here if there are two or three books that you can recommend There are a few but if I can still mean on one because this one is something that more and more I keep repeating to myself also to remind I usually don't recommend books so much but this is one that is so relevant not only for fracking or the dead for colonialism and for Eurocentrism this is called the open veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galliano and his dead now but he was a great writer and his book became a masterpiece of Latin American history and the history of colonialism and there you can see really well also explained how the global south the veins of the global south flow to the global north you know all the products all the raw materials and how this is done so the open veins of Latin America is by far the most urgent and important book to read in my opinion because we also the climate crisis that we are fighting that we're facing has colonialism at its roots and it's not about 1.5 or the IPCC or these abstract numbers only unless you understand the rules we will not be able to fight the symptoms so thank you for the interview and helping us spread the word Thank you very much Esteban it's been fascinating and for sharing your story and it's been very inspiring