Manifesto. For Climate Justice, we will not remain silent

We are the Caribbean and Latin American expression of diversity. Antilleans, islanders, river dwellers, environmental activists, children of the sugarcane fields, peasant women, Indigenous peoples, youth in resistance and re-existence, Black people, ancestral miners and fishers, women who give birth to life, guardians of seeds, water, nature, and pollinators. Victims of armed conflict, megaprojects in our territories, and colonialism. Popular inhabitants who are not on the maps, leaders of urban hillside areas, apprentices of the mountain that shelters us in the face of multiple dispossessions, and educators committed to transformations from within academia. Gathered in Medellín, Colombia, between June 15 and 17, 2023, in the “Caribbean-Latin American Encounter for Climate Justice"From where we put our words."

We are connected through our history to ancestral community struggles for a better future together, in the face of power relations that impose dispossession, extractivism, and a capitalist, colonialist, and patriarchal development model that runs counter to our worldviews, community practices, and ways of life. In this gathering, we share flavors and knowledge, food traditions, aromas that transport us to our ancestral lands, healing plants, exchanged seeds, and powerful wisdom.

We recognize the life that resides in the waters. We defend the rivers: Nechí, Cauca, Dormilón, Porce, Yurumanguí. We defend the páramos, such as Pisba in Colombia, and other territories vital for sustaining life. We defend the Piedras River, the Martín Peña canal, and the San Juan Bay estuary in Puerto Rico. We defend the island of Vieques and the Garifuna people, the mangroves, and the Caribbean Sea, which connects Colombia, Honduras, and Puerto Rico with all our biodiversity. We defend our territories in cities, rural communities, and mountains, from the Caribbean islands to Patagonia at the southern tip of the continent.

We reclaim the power of our own art and culture to amplify our voices. We also champion critical pedagogies that engage with our identities. We explore the possibilities of learning through academic collaboration for socio-political action and influence, fostering dialogue through a flexible action-research approach that moves between academic, community, and political spheres. We cherish our territories, which we intend to remain in despite all attempts to dispossess us. Our land must be defended, cherished, and enjoyed, and so we are learning to navigate the challenges of floods, the mass movements in the mountains, the effects of climate change revealed by our bodies, and the challenges posed by water scarcity. We are building our neighborhoods, processes, and practices ourselves, guided by our dignity. Furthermore, we promote struggles for autonomy—economic, water, food, and energy—embodyed with joy as a core value of resistance.

We remember the power of the voices of our sisters, mothers, grandmothers, of all the women who have forged paths centered on the care and sustenance of life. They remind us that we must heal our territories, our bodies, our souls from the scars inflicted by a system of death. They reiterate the need to carry out this process collectively and through exchange, because “together we create wonders in our territories.”

We are against the global capitalism of disaster, which destroys humanity, nature, our territories, and our lives through mining and energy projects in "sacrifice zones." We recognize the evident loss of biodiversity in the birds that no longer arrive, the fruits we no longer eat, and the crabs that no longer roam their habitats. We denounce the violation of bodies and the epistemic, sexual, racial, and colonial violence. We are against constant hunger, as well as the multiple forms of dispossession that continue to devastate our territories. This development model that puts us at risk manifests itself in monocultures that poison the water and deplete the soil, in urban real estate pressure and gentrification that dispossesses working-class neighborhoods, and in the tourism industry that privatizes beaches. It also manifests itself in hydroelectric dams that kill rivers, in mega-mining that destroys rainforests and all life within them, and in the increase in atmospheric phenomena that endanger our lands and marine territories. In the privatization of community aqueducts, common goods, fauna and flora, which are understood as resources of global capital.

We witness the changing nature of our territories due to foreign interests, those drawn by the allure of "paradisiacal islands," which displace us. These supposedly "legal" investments arrive to intervene in megaprojects that alter climatic conditions, expropriate natural resources, displace human and animal communities, exacerbating conflict and grave human rights violations, and stigmatizing territories and communities. We also witness the various forms of pollution: noise, visual, and environmental. The increased cost of living results from the commodification of nature, where "we lack potable water for the population, yet we have the capacity to feed the greed of a multinational corporation." We observe that maps of poverty and socio-environmental conflicts coincide in their multiple forms of dispossession. We denounce the false solutions of green capitalism in the face of climate change and the planetary-civilizational crisis.

We denounce the militarization of life and its consequences. We denounce the criminalization and prosecution of community and environmental leaders, who have been forced to disappear and be murdered in these struggles, because “we don’t ask permission” to be in our territories and we remain there together. We also denounce the system that blames the victims for the disastrous consequences it itself creates.

Given these territorial realities in the Caribbean and Latin America, where “we suffer the same pains, the same aggressions, but also enjoy the same resistance,” the organized communities that nurture and defend life in these territories have been advancing actions to strengthen organizational processes and community autonomy for the protection of all forms of life. We understand that this autonomy also resides in the solidarity among peoples, manifested in self-management, the exchange of ancestral and popular knowledge, and the collective efforts that contribute to community energy models, community-based water and risk management, food sovereignty, and the autonomy in the life we ​​want and can live.

We are the swarm of wills that empowers us to advance the necessary changes, uniting in our diversity to protect and care for the environment. We are committed to growing agroecological spirals, joining with the ravines as our "neighbors," addressing needs and responding to everyday problems collectively. We carry out training activities for the collective development of alternative proposals, mobilization, advocacy, visibility, and community planning.

We recognize ourselves as women with the right to the land, to grow our own food, and to defend our bodies as our primary battleground. We strive to rebuild life in territories heavily polluted and ravaged by war and gentrification, through diverse conservation practices, solidarity economy initiatives, environmental education, and playful, artistic, and cultural activities. We also recognize ourselves in the struggle against a patriarchy that prevents us from being, flourishing, and speaking out. That is why we have decided to come together, heal, practice care, overcome fear, and transform our territories into spaces for life and joy.

We foster intergenerational dialogues in educational processes we conduct with children, adolescents, and young people in schools, rural communities, universities, mountains, rivers, and streets, so they may understand and recognize the value of human and non-human relatives, as well as common goods, and be able to protect them. We also work with community-based schools in various territories where we continue to move forward through words and actions committed to achieving dignity and justice.

The challenges posed by the current climate crisis compel us to think globally, feel with the people, and act locally. To that end, we require dialogue to connect at all levels, shaping a popular identity. People making decisions from the bottom up, overcoming the artificial barriers represented by political and administrative borders. Sometimes with, sometimes without, occasionally despite, and even against the state, addressing at the local level what pertains to each process. Demanding that institutions assume their responsibilities for the historical damage caused to our territories. 

We are committed to continuing to intertwine, pollinating re-existence across diverse territories, with pedagogies of care that recognize and value our paths, knowledge, and experiences. Nature does not threaten or endanger us; on the contrary, it makes life possible, and we require equitable connections between diverse species, free from the human arrogance of control and domination. We are committed to reforesting, planting, and restoring our waters, lands, plants, seeds, and bodies. 

We believe in strategic litigation that strengthens the legitimacy of collective action and ensures that political influence extends beyond mere rhetoric and agendas to include budgets, situated research, concrete actions, and both possible and impossible dialogues. We cannot normalize injustice, and therefore we call for continued forging and strengthening alliances, advancing appropriate methodologies, techniques, and technologies, as well as practices for mitigating the climate crisis and building a Just Energy Transition that goes beyond mere expressions of concern.

We issue a unified call for inclusive climate action that considers the aspirations, dreams, and hopes of organizations and communities. We call for strengthening alliances of resistance, maintaining unity, and emphasizing collective action and solidarity in an agile, versatile, and flexible manner. We also call for advocacy through public debate with local, national, and international decision-makers.

We recognize the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples, the healing spirituality of communities, which teaches us that life is in nature, that it is medicine, food, oxygen, air. We persist in asking how to care for planetary life. For example, through harvesting relationships, water, sunlight, and energy for just and inclusive transitions, as well as with other territorial elements such as air, water, forests, and fire. 

We declare that we stubbornly remain in our territories, “with a firm step like the walking mangrove.” We raise our voices, opening possible and impossible cracks, confronting global dispossession and advancing toward greater social, cognitive, sexual, and climate justice. Contrary to the narrative of impossibility, our dreams, actions, and commitments are viable, and our continued existence on this planet depends on them, through different ways of relating to nature, which sustains, cares for, and maintains us. Because, as they tell us from the Yurumanguí River, “we die the day we remain silent in the face of injustice, and we will not remain silent.”

Medellin Colombia
June 17 2023
CLACSO Working Group
Political ecologies from the South/Abya-Yala [+]

Political Ecology and Water Justice Study Group, Medellín, Colombia
Landslide Movement
Popular Training Institute (IPC)
Research Group on Sociology of Law and Critical Legal Theories of the Faculty of Law and Political Science of the University of Antioquia
The Wild Beehive, Puerto Rico
Casa Pueblo Adjuntas, Puerto Rico
Las Malcriá, Puerto Rico
Freedom Legal Corporation
Honduran Black Fraternal Organization OFRANEH
Social Movement for Life and Defense of the Territory MOVETE
Western Belt Environmental COA
SETAA Communities Sowing Territories, Waters and Autonomies
Censat-Agua Viva
International Collective of Feminist Ecologies of Knowledge
Human Connect, Together We Are
Association of Everlasting Peasant Women
Transdisciplinary Institute for Social Research and Action ITIAS
from the University of Puerto Rico at Humacao
Puerto Rico Community Water Network
Tierrap
Collective of Women Birthers of Life from the Yurumanguí River
Regional Association of Women of Eastern Antioquia
Community Action Board El Faro, Medellín
Community Action Board of the El Pacífico neighborhood, Medellín
Multiactive Fishing and Agricultural Association of Nechí
Network + Creating a Safer Space
Research group on water conflicts, violations and forms of self-protection

This text expresses the position of the aforementioned CLACSO Working Group and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.