Resource Wars Connect an Amazon Massacre and Shell’s Arctic Drilling

2012-09-09 · first published in marxsite · 115 words

This was not a Socialist Resistance publication. marxsite was Phil Hearse’s own long-form site, run alongside the paper he helped edit. It is kept here with his agreement, recovered from the Internet Archive after the domain lapsed and was taken over by someone else; nothing here links to the address it now points at.

Only a fragment of this survives. It may have been a short link-and-comment post, which marxsite ran many of, or the opening of a longer piece cut off by the capture — from what remains there is no way to tell which.

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Subhankar Banerjee ( ClimateStoryTellers )

Small illegal groups or big corporations supported by governments are destroying human and nonhuman communities to extract resources.

Yanomami settlement in the Amazon, and the other about Obama green lighting Shell’s drilling in the Arctic Ocean. Both are about resource wars that lead to killing—humans and/or animals, fast or slow, one to get gold, and the other to get oil.

“A massacre of up to 80 Yanomami Indians has taken place in the Venezuelan state of Amazonas,” The Guardian reported. “According to local testimonies an armed group [illegal gold miners] flew over in a helicopter, opening fire with guns and launching explosives into Irotatheri settlement in the High Ocamo area.”