No climate justice, no racial justice, no peace!
No climate justice, no racial justice, no peace!
by Shodona Kettle
‘…the climate crisis cannot be solved without solving racial crisis. The two are inseparable’. Tao Leigh Goffe. Dark Laboratory: On columbus, the Caribbean and the origins of the climate crisis
Historical and contemporary inequalities cause environmental and climate crises that cast a heavy shadow over the Americas. These inequalities disproportionately impact Indigenous and Afro-descended communities in Latin America and the Caribbean who are some of the most at-risk groups. Many of these communities live in areas that are often, on the one hand, precarious because they are vulnerable to hurricanes, flooding and pollution. On the other hand, some of these territories are fertile grounds abundant in natural resources and biodiversity making their preservation crucial.
Unpredictable weather patterns, particularly along the Central American Dry Corridor, wreak havoc on subsistence farming, the lifeline of many Indigenous communities like the Mopan and Chortí groups in Guatemala. In nations like El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua, drought and floods threaten traditional agricultural practice. These challenges, in turn, threaten food sources, economic stability, and spiritual practices tied to the land.
In Nicaragua’s northern Caribbean, the Mayangna community’s struggle to protect their ancestral lands in the Bosawás biosphere has led to tragic losses of their leaders, as they confront forces encroaching on their territory. Colombia is a similar case in point. There, Afro-Colombians residing along the Pacific coast confront the reality of historic discrimination alongside the intractable internal armed conflict. Despite the 1991 Constitution with its Ley 70 [Law 70] which grants specific protections for collective rights, such groups are often specifically targeted for defending their ancestral territories against resource extraction.
The Garífuna, an Afro-Indigenous People mainly residing along the shorelines of Guatemala, Belize, Honduras and Nicaragua, reckon with a similar reality. In Honduras, for instance, the government on the one hand celebrates Caribbean coastal Garifuna Blackness as unique and exotic – excellent for tourism. Conversely, under the guise of development initiatives and through ‘neoliberal appropriation of racial geography’ the government and private companies have forcibly displaced Garífuna communities from their coastal lands for tourism and agribusiness ‘…ensuring that Black people remain on the fringes of economic and political life’ as suggested by anthropologist Christopher Loperena. Their rights are violated despite several favourable rulings by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The grassroots organisation OFRANEH – Organización Fraternal Negra Hondureña (Honduran Black Fraternal Organisation) – has been at the forefront of resisting environmental injustice, organising protests, legal actions, and a radical practice of Rescate territorial , the land rescue missions to defend Garífuna ancestral territories.
Belize’s Garífuna and Indigenous Peoples like Guyana’s Wachipan are also amplifying their concerns for land rights recognition through declarations and local workshops. Belize’s Maya and Suriname’s Indigenous communities collaborate with organisations like the Caribbean Natural Resources Institute (CANARI) to foster sustainable methods and resilience to these ever-evolving climate changes. Jamaica’s Accompong Maroons struggle against bauxite mining threatening their historic ancestral territories in Cockpit Country and have written shadow reports for the UN Committee on Racial Discrimination (see CERD Report – Sovereign State of Accompong, 2022).
Similarly, in Panama, Indigenous communities from the nation’s various comarcas unite with environmentalists and other marginalised groups to oppose copper mining. These groups’ ancestral ties to their lands put them at odds with environmental and cultural threats posed by industrial development.
Women and girls are vital to protecting, defending, and sustaining ancestral lands, and are often targeted for their activism; Berta Cáceres of the Lenca community in Honduras, Adriana and Virginia Ortiz García of the Movement of Triqui Unification and Struggle in Mexico, and Maria Bernadete Pacífico a Quilombola of Brazil epitomises this reality. However, few laws that regulate community-level tenure adequately protect their rights within these community structures.
Networks such as the Black and Indigenous Liberation Movement (BILM) work to emphasise the need for Afro-descendant and Indigenous communities to pool their advocacy resources to confront environmental disasters. Their claim: there is no climate justice without racial justice as reinforced by interdisciplinary scholar and artist Tao Leigh Goffe in the epithet. During their first conference in Quito, Ecuador in October 2023, BILM members made up of Afro-descendants and Indigenous communities from various organisations from the Americas, from Canada to Haiti, gathered together to debate the themes of racial and ethnic discrimination, encroachment on ancestral territories, climate justice and reparation. They declared:
Land is the foundation of freedom. All Indigenous lands and territories must be returned to their rightful owners – communes, communities, peoples, and nations. We affirm our right to live in our territories according to our own cosmovisions and spiritual traditions. The land must be restored to the peoples to whom it belongs. All Black and Afro-descendant communities must have full self-determination over the lands they inhabit, along with unrestricted access to their natural resources, including beaches, jungles, wetlands, Andean forests, plains, watersheds, rivers, glaciers, inter-Andean valleys, high-altitude wetlands, lakes, grasslands, mangroves, bays, hillsides, ravines, and páramos. These ecosystems must never be privatised or exploited under any circumstances.
There can be no climate justice without racial justice. Climate justice acknowledges that climate change affects people differently depending on their economic, social, racial, and gender conditions. At the same time, racial justice is a fundamental pillar in the fight against inequalities caused by the colonial, capitalist, extractivist, and agro-export system. (see Articles. 2 and 3 of the BILM declaration.
In the fifth article of the declaration BILM advocates further promulgate that
We understand that racial justice requires recognising the structural and systemic racism experienced by Indigenous, Black, and Afro-descendant peoples. We demand that all historical and ongoing harms caused by systemic violence be repaired, ensuring our rights to land, identity, self-determination, and the governance of all resources within our territories.
Some of these demands are visisble in UN fora; , Article 8(j) of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity at Cop16, for instance. BILM members and the broader Black and Indigenous community successfully lobbied for their demands to be included in the UN Convention – transforming the legal understanding of their historical contributions to environmental stewardship and right to shape environmental policies.
While inclusion in the Convention is a step in the right direction, it is a symbolic one. The long durée of historic and contemporary struggles among Afro-descendant communities and Indigenous Peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean underscore the need for sustainable reparative models that abide by Indigenous, Afrocentric and local knowledges. Without taking this step, harms continue and peace is denied.