23 April 22
The Alarming Departure of Our Larger Donors
We are looking at a decline of 30% in donations and funding from just 30 days ago. One big contributing factor is that there are no larger donations this month. Nothing at all in the $500 to $1,000 range, not one. That’s rare.
We have small donations, we need matching funds.
Urgently.
Marc Ash
Founder, Reader Supported News
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23 April 22
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"First and foremost, this senseless war must stop. But as the fighting shows no sign of abating, it is vital that all parties to the conflict give clear instructions to their combatants to strictly respect international humanitarian law and international human rights law," U.N. Human Rights spokesperson Ravina Shamdasani said in a briefing to journalists.
Satellite images released late Thursday appeared to show more than 200 new graves in a town where Ukrainian officials say the Russians have been burying Mariupol residents killed in the fighting. The eastern port city of Mariupol has seen some of the worst suffering of the war, and the imagery, from Maxar Technologies, showed long rows of graves stretching away from an existing cemetery in the town of Manhush, some 12 miles from Mariupol.
Local officials accused Russia of burying up to 9,000 Ukrainian civilians in mass graves in an effort to conceal the slaughter taking place in the city, which has been under siege since the early days of the war.
"The bodies of the dead were being brought by the truckload and actually simply being dumped in mounds," Piotr Andryushchenko, an aide to Mariupol's mayor, said on Telegram.
There was no immediate reaction from the Kremlin on the satellite pictures. When mass graves and hundreds of dead civilians were discovered in Bucha and other towns around Kyiv after Russian troops retreated three weeks ago, Russian officials denied that their soldiers killed any civilians there and falsely accused Ukraine of staging the atrocities.
People fleeing Mariupol have described being trapped in horrible conditions. Yuriy and Polina Lulac said they spent nearly two months living in a basement with at least a dozen other people with no running water and little food.
"What was happening there was so horrible that you can't describe it," said Yuriy Lulac, who used a derogatory word for the Russian troops, saying they were "killing people for nothing."
"Mariupol is gone. In the courtyards there are just graves and crosses," he said.
"Horror story of violations perpetrated against civilians"
"Over these eight weeks, international humanitarian law has not merely been ignored but seemingly tossed aside," Shamdasani said.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights' mission in Ukraine has verified 5,264 civilian casualties, including 2,345 deaths, since the war began on Feb. 24. It said that 92.3% of those were recorded in Ukrainian government-controlled territory. The office uses strict methodology and has long acknowledged that its confirmed figures are far short of the real numbers.
"The actual numbers are going to be much higher" as more details emerge from places such as Mariupol where there is intense fighting," Shamdasani said.
"Almost every resident in Bucha our colleagues spoke to told us about the death of a relative, a neighbour or even a stranger. We know much more needs to be done to uncover what happened there and we also know Bucha is not an isolated incident," Shamdasani said.
The office said in a statement that "Russian armed forces have indiscriminately shelled and bombed populated areas, killing civilians and wrecking hospitals, schools and other civilian infrastructure - actions that may amount to war crimes." It added that the U.N. mission also has "documented what appears to be the use of weapons with indiscriminate effects, causing civilian casualties and damage to civilian objects, by Ukrainian armed forces in the east of the country."
On April 9, U.N. human rights officers visiting Bucha documented the unlawful killing, including by summary execution, of around 50 civilians.
"The scale of summary executions of civilians in areas previously occupied by Russian forces is emerging," Shamdasani said. "The preservation of evidence and decent treatment of mortal remains must be ensured, as well as psychological and other relief for victims and their relatives."
The U.N. mission has received more than 300 allegations of killings of civilians in previously occupied towns in the Kyiv, Chernihiv, Kharkiv and Sumy regions.
The U.N. rights office said its mission also has recorded 114 attacks on medical facilities "although the actual figure is likely to be considerably higher."
"We estimate that at least 3,000 civilians have died because they couldn't get medical care and because of the stress on their health amid the hostilities," Shamdasani said. "This includes being forced by Russian armed forces to stay in basements or not being allowed to leave their homes for days or weeks."
The U.N. mission so far has received 75 allegations of sexual violence against women, men, girls and boys by Russian soldiers, most in the Kyiv region. The human rights office said detention of civilians "has become a widespread practice" in areas controlled by Russian forces and affiliated groups, with 155 such cases reported so far.
It said it also received information about "alleged arbitrary and incommunicado detentions" by Ukrainian forces or people aligned with them. And it pointed to videos put out by both sides apparently showing the intimidation, interrogation, torture or killing of prisoners of war.
"Those in command of armed forces must make it clear to their fighters that anyone found to have been involved in such violations will be prosecuted and held accountable," Shamdasani said.
Bill McKibben. (photo: Wolfgang Schmidt)
Even as we watch the horrors daily inflicted on the Ukrainians, we have not been asked to change our daily habits in any way to be of help to them.
In our collective memory, America immediately rose to the challenge of Hitler. But, of course, that’s not really true—after Hitler had attacked the Sudetenland and Poland and even France, America was content to let Europe fight its own wars. In the winter of 1940, Gallup found that just twelve per cent of Americans wanted to declare war on Germany. Later in the fall, the country was split down the middle on the question of “Should the United States risk going to war to help the United Kingdom?” Major parts of the establishment—the Chamber of Commerce, for instance—opposed even President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lend-lease plan to send matériel to defend Europe. Meanwhile, the America First movement attracted a wide following, which included a young John Kennedy and Gerald Ford, not to mention Walt Disney—and, notoriously, Charles Lindbergh. The museum notes the involvement of Kingman Brewster, Jr., who later became the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom and the president of Yale; in those years, though, as a student activist, he organized across America to keep the country from being “entrapped” in foreign wars.
F.D.R., as the exhibits make clear, did his best to keep Britain going as he worked to change public opinion. Japan’s attack on the U.S. eventually did that; Brewster enlisted in the Navy right after Pearl Harbor, and so did the rest of America, at least metaphorically. The displays about the home front are literally riveting—you can wield a gun like the one that real-life Rosies would have used in factories and shipyards. There are food-ration books and recipe books, some published by the government, to help people cook with those rations. (“The Victory Cook Book,” free with any purchase of Lysol, instructed women that “every housewife’s job is to maintain her family’s health and spirits.”) There are bomb-shaped piggy banks that were given to children so that they could save for war bonds, and, to remind Americans to keep recycling metal, lurid posters of Axis aircraft in flames. (“Your Scrap Brought It Down.”) Looking at the displays reminds one of the somewhat perplexing fact that, so far, even as we watch the horrors daily inflicted on the people of Ukraine, we have not been asked to change our daily habits in any way to be of help to them.
It is, for instance, widely acknowledged at this point that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is financed by fossil fuel, and that Putin is exploiting his control of Europe’s oil and gas to wage it. Belatedly, Europeans seem to be waking up to their complicity; the Germans have announced plans to speed up their conversion to renewable energy, and, on Saturday, President Emmanuel Macron, of France, eight days out from his reëlection bid, called on his nation to get off fossil fuel altogether.
President Biden did stop the importation of Russian oil to this country. But, because oil is traded on a world market, that hasn’t done much to hamper Putin. Indeed, as oil prices have surged around the world, Russia’s receipts from the oil that it can still sell have surged, too: the nation reports that its current account surplus nearly doubled in the first quarter of this year. In order for prices to fall, demand for all oil needs to be cut. Everyone who can work from home could continue to do so, at least on, say, Mondays, knocking a day off the national commute. Carpools could be organized, taking special advantage of the fact that there are now two million electric cars on the road. More bike paths could be made available, and, when air-conditioning season begins, Americans could turn their thermostats up a degree. And we could be building and sending millions of electric heat pumps to Europe, and installing them in our own homes. As Ari Matusiak, the C.E.O. of Rewiring America, a nonprofit working on the transition to clean energy, and Senator Martin Heinrich, Democrat of New Mexico, recently wrote for the Hill, “For too long, we have wanted to help in the fight, but had no way into battle. Electrifying your home one machine at a time is today’s Victory Garden—a thing you can do to fight tyranny, inflation, and runaway emissions.”
Yet we’ve been asked to do none of these things. Joe Biden has done a nuanced and tempered job of dealing with the military threat that Putin poses, walking the fine and scary line between assistance and provocation. But on the home front he and his Administration seem to think that Americans aren’t capable of much. Instead of asking us to conserve energy, which would also help his climate goals, they’ve given in to the demands of the fossil-fuel industry. This past Friday, the White House announced that it was going to open vast new sections of public land for more oil drilling, though it will take years for that action to reduce gas prices—and the policy violates the President’s remarkably specific campaign pledge. This just takes us deeper into a world dominated by oil and gas—the kind of hothouse in which Putinish despots thrive.
During the Second World War, victory demanded more oil—the museum in New Orleans documents the construction of big pipelines from Texas to the Northeast, and the construction of huge Navy oil tankers. (There’s also an account of how Esso, the forerunner to ExxonMobil, organized a special training program for “girl chemists.”) In the wars dominating the globe today—Putin’s land grab in Ukraine, and the global land grab caused by rising sea levels and spreading deserts—victory demands getting off fossil fuels as fast as we possibly can. Just as Biden has so far failed to match F.D.R. in getting crucial spending programs through Congress (which, to be fair, is far more narrowly divided than in Roosevelt’s time), so he has failed to match his predecessor in explaining to Americans why some sacrifice—or even some change—would be tonic. This Earth Day, that silence seems particularly profound.
Melissa Lucio speaks on the phone from death row in Gatesville, Texas, in 2018, in a still from the documentary "The State of Texas vs. Melissa." (photo: FilmRise)
The state says Lucio beat her daughter to death. But as new details have emerged about her case, a growing chorus of lawmakers, faith leaders, anti-domestic violence organizations and celebrities has called for clemency. At least one juror from the trial says the jury wasn't given the full picture — and that if he had known more, he would have never voted for the death penalty.
"No court has ever considered the new evidence of Melissa Lucio's innocence," says Vanessa Potkin, director of special litigation at the Innocence Project and one of Lucio's attorneys. "So first and foremost, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could issue a stay so that the evidence of Melissa Lucio's innocence can be fully litigated in the court. And that's what we're hoping for."
The case hinges on an interrogation of Lucio conducted two hours after Mariah died, during which officers tried to get Lucio to confess to hurting her daughter.
Lucio's attorneys say police had already decided on a narrative when they brought her in for interrogation. After five hours of questioning, during which Lucio expressed her innocence more than 100 times, she eventually said "I guess I did it" when asked if she was responsible for some of her daughter's injuries. The state called it an admission of guilt for Mariah's death.
Potkin says Lucio had inadequate defense during her trial. Witness testimony from one of Mariah's siblings about the 2-year-old's fall down an uneven staircase two days before her death never made it before the jury, and expert witnesses were not allowed to testify on reasons why Lucio might have made a false "confession."
She is scheduled to die by lethal injection on Wednesday. If she is killed, she would be the first Hispanic woman to be executed in Texas in the modern era of the death penalty, and the first woman executed in Texas since 2014.
Who is Melissa Lucio?
Lucio, 53, is a Mexican American woman who has struggled against poverty and abuse since childhood. She is the mother of 14 children, including Mariah.
According to court documents submitted by Lucio's attorneys, she was sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend starting at the age of 6 — abuse that lasted for two years. She married at age 16. According to the Innocence Project, it was an abusive marriage. Her first husband, the group says, was a violent alcoholic who left her after she gave birth to their five children.
"Her next partner continued the cycle of violence, punching her in public and beating her at home. By the time she gave birth to her twelfth child, Melissa had experienced homelessness, drug addiction, and severe mental illness," according to an amicus brief filed by former prosecutors, anti-violence organizations and others on Lucio's behalf.
Lucio was pregnant with twin boys at the time of Mariah's death and when she was interrogated. She gave birth to the twins while in jail and was forced to give them up for adoption.
In 2007, Lucio's family was living in a second-floor apartment in Harlingen, in Texas' Rio Grande Valley, and the family was preparing and packing to move to a new home.
"At some point they didn't hear Mariah playing anymore, went to check on her, and she had managed to get out of the screen door and was at the bottom of the staircase," says Potkin, the Innocence Project attorney. "Melissa didn't observe the fall herself. She saw Mariah at the bottom with a bleeding lip, but she otherwise didn't appear to be seriously injured. One of Mariah's other siblings witnessed the fall and later, when interviewed by Child Protective Services after Mariah's death, stated that he saw his sibling fall down the stairs."
Some of that evidence, says Potkin, was not disclosed to the defense as they were preparing for trial.
Why do people think she's innocent?
At Lucio's trial, expert witnesses for the defense were not allowed to testify as to why she might have given a false confession. Among the experts her attorneys sought to put on the stand was a psychologist who planned to testify that Lucio's history as a survivor of domestic and sexual abuse helped explain why she told interrogators what they wanted to hear — even if it wasn't true. But the trial judge ruled that testimony "irrelevant," according to court documents.
Potkin says it's now recognized that "having a trauma history such as Melissa had, being a survivor of sexual abuse and domestic abuse, is a risk factor and vulnerability during custodial interrogation for false confession."
False confessions are more common than you might think. More than a quarter of people exonerated by the Innocence Project in recent decades had confessed to the crime they allegedly committed, as Science reported.
There have also been questions about the testimony provided by the medical examiner alleging that injuries on Mariah's body were clear signs of abuse. But Lucio had no history of child abuse. She admitted that she had spanked Mariah on the butt, but denied abusing her. A pathologist interviewed by The Intercept says the medical examiner who conducted Mariah's autopsy jumped to conclusions and ignored evidence that Mariah died due to an accident.
"There is significant evidence of her innocence that no court, no fact finder has ever considered," Potkin says. She says that after Mariah's family discovered the child had stopped breathing, they frantically called for help — and the responding police rushed to judgment in concluding that Mariah's death had been a murder, due to profound bruising on her body.
Instead, Potkin says, the blood coagulation seen in Mariah's autopsy was the result of an accidental head injury, like a fall down stairs. It's a disorder, she says, that in other cases has been "confused for child abuse because it causes extensive bleeding and bruising throughout the body."
Lucio's supporters say many of the issues in her trial trace back to the head prosecutor in the case, Armando Villalobos. The former Cameron County district attorney recently spent several years in federal prison for bribery and extortion. At the time of Lucio's trial, Villalobos was running for reelection against a challenger who criticized him for not thoroughly investigating or prosecuting charges of child abuse. Lucio's attorneys say Villalobos wanted to make an example of Lucio to prove he was tough on crime.
Her family maintains her innocence and has pushed hard to get her off death row. Five of the trial's 12 jurors have called for her clemency.
"She is an innocent woman," John Lucio, Melissa's eldest son, told Latino USA at a protest outside the Cameron County Courthouse in February. "She is not guilty of the death of my baby sister."
What have the courts said?
Lucio and her attorneys have not had success in reversing the initial verdict. A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit reviewed Lucio's case and overturned it, finding that she had been denied the opportunity to present a full defense at her trial and that a new trial was warranted.
But the state of Texas appealed the decision, and the case then went to the 17 judges that comprise the 5th Circuit. A majority of the judges said the conviction had to be upheld because they were barred by a procedural rule that limits a federal court's ability to review state court findings.
Last October, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.
What chances does she have left?
To prevent Lucio from being executed, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott could grant her clemency. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals could also stop the execution.
Abbott's office did not respond to a request for comment, but in March the governor said he was awaiting a decision by the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles. "I'll make a decision once it comes to me," Abbott told KRGV, an ABC News affiliate in the Rio Grande Valley.
Cameron County District Attorney Luis Saenz — who was not the DA at the time of Lucio's trial — told Texas lawmakers last week that he would move to delay Lucio's execution if the Board of Pardons and Paroles rejects calls for clemency and the courts don't intervene.
"If Melissa does not get a stay by a certain day, then I will do what I have to do and stop it," Saenz said, as the Austin American-Statesman reported.
Saenz's office did not respond to a request for comment on the case.
Potkin said that now is a complicated time emotionally for Lucio.
"While there is great optimism in some regards because of the support and because it seems to be resonating with so many people, that she has a compelling claim of innocence and just the injustice that would happen if this execution goes forward," Potkin said on Wednesday. "At the same time, here we are, seven days away from her execution date. And so she has to confront that reality, too, that the execution could go forward."
Lucio's thoughts are with her children, Potkin said, as she talks to friends about the roles they could play in the life of her kids if she is not alive after next week.
Chris Smalls, center, wearing baseball cap, celebrates with other members of the Amazon Labor Union after workers at an Amazon warehouse on Staten Island voted to join the union. (photo: Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP)
The aggressive appointment of Jennifer Abruzzo shows how electoral politics set the groundwork for mass organizing.
Their neighbors’ victory at the JFK8 warehouse earlier this month shocked the corporate world. And while Democrats have been faceplanting in Congress, the Amazon victory by a ragtag crew with just $120,000 from GoFundMe has raised the question of what value there really is in electoral politics. Should people just focus on building power for a base of working people instead, and abandon the duopoly?
A closer look at how Chris Smalls — who led the organizing effort after being fired from Amazon — and his allies put this win together, and are threatening to win again soon, shows that you actually can’t have mass organizing without electoral victories. The two very much work together, not as an either/or.
One of Joe Biden’s most aggressive appointments as president was naming Jennifer Abruzzo general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board. With pushes to make unionizing significantly easier, she might be the only person that bothers the Wall Street Journal editorial board more than Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan.
In December, under pressure, Amazon agreed to a critical settlement with the NLRB, in which they agreed to allow workers to organize inside their facilities, just not on the shop floor.
“This settlement agreement provides a crucial commitment from Amazon to millions of its workers across the United States that it will not interfere with their right to act collectively to improve their workplace by forming a union or taking other collective action,” said Abruzzo in a statement at the time.
President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement talks a big game about being pro-worker, but when it came to their material and economic interests in the form of unionizing, they were nowhere to be seen. Trump’s NLRB absolutely would not have reached this settlement with Amazon.
Distinguishing it from a Big Labor-led union drive, the Amazon Labor Union, or ALU, effort was driven by workers and former workers, who had access to the facility that professional organizers lack. Smalls said their ability to organize inside the plant was key to their success. “They try to install that fear into these workers, they try to tell them that they talk to us, they get fired,” Chris Smalls told Jordan Chariton of Status Coup. “But the difference is this is completely worker-led. These workers that are on the inside get that information in real time. And that right there has been a huge success for us.”
During a union drive by professional organizers at a Bessemer, Alabama, warehouse, Amazon hired union-busters who would walk the shop floor and talk to workers, telling them how awful unions are. The initial vote, which was prior to the NLRB settlement, failed. A redo is still being counted but looks bad for the union. In Staten Island, workers were able to fight back by exposing them from the get-go.
As HuffPost reported, they created flyers identifying the most prolific union-busters in the warehouse, listing where they’re based (typically far away), and how much money they had earned on union-busting campaigns. They would put stacks of the flyers in break rooms throughout the facility so everyone would see them and know how much Amazon was spending to fly anti-union consultants in from around the country.
Conor Spence, an Amazon worker, told HuffPost’s Dave Jamieson he would follow consultants around the warehouse, handing workers copies of their Labor Department filings that showed their $300-per-hour fees. It was an extremely powerful tactic, he said. If it was worth it to Amazon to pay somebody that much to convince workers not to join a union, the union must be pretty powerful.
Spence also told Jamieson that there was one extremely effective female consultant who would chat the male workers up: “All the guys in her department were in love with her,” he said. The men defended her when union organizers called her out. But when they produced copies of her disclosure filings showing she had made nearly $20,000 for just one week of union-busting, they felt betrayed.
Outside the warehouse, the Smalls crew set up tents where they’d feed workers lunch, help them with any issues they were having, talk shop, hang out, and even share weed. Amazon complained to the NLRB about the free pot, but ALU’s lawyer defended it as no different than passing out T-shirts, as far as labor law was concerned.
Without that work inside the warehouse, and without all the organizing in that tent outside the warehouse, there’s simply no way they could have successfully organized the union. And without the NLRB forcing Amazon to allow that organizing to take place, that organizing wouldn’t have been able to happen.
None of this would be a surprise to Eugene V. Debs, the legendary Gilded Age railroad union organizer. The massive worker uprisings from the 1870s to 1890s were ruthlessly crushed not just by bosses, but by bosses working hand in hand with National Guard troops and police forces. Only with the New Deal did the state become either neutral or supportive of organizing. In 1936, when Ford workers engaged in a sit-down strike, the company appealed to the federal government to help them break the strike. President Franklin D. Roosevelt told Ford that it was their problem and to go work it out. FDR didn’t help, but by not crushing the workers, he gave them the chance to win, and they did. In the 1980s, that reversed, with President Ronald Reagan actively siding with companies to crush unions.
So it’s not that electing Democrats magically brings about a union movement or will get your own workplace unionized. But what it did here was give the workers a fair shot.
A woman wears a sweater with an image of Patrick Lyoya as protesters march for Lyoya in downtown Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Saturday. (photo: Mustafa Hussain/Getty Images)
Like most of the congregation, Lyoya belonged to a sprawling African diaspora in Grand Rapids who came to the United States seeking safety and a better life. In Lyoya's case, his family arrived as refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2014. They had escaped war and fear of persecution, and after more than a decade in a refugee camp, they seemed to have finally found a haven in Michigan.
America meant opportunity for the family, so when Banza Mukalay, the pastor at Restoration Community Church and himself a refugee from Congo, met Lyoya, he could sense a promising life ahead.
"He was a very young [man] who had the future, he had something in it," Mukalay said. "You [could] see him just trying to look for himself how he [could] be better in the future."
That future came to a sudden and tragic end earlier this month when Lyoya was shot and killed by a Grand Rapids police officer after he was pulled over for allegedly driving with an unregistered license plate. Video of the April 4 traffic stop released by the Grand Rapids police showed a brief foot chase followed by a struggle over the white officer's Taser. The video ends with the officer shooting Lyoya in the back of the head while he was facedown on the ground. Lyoya was 26.
The harrowing video of Lyoya's final moments has spawned days of protest in Grand Rapids over the death of yet another Black man at the hands of law enforcement. Nearly two years after George Floyd's murder sparked a nationwide reckoning over racial injustice and police misconduct, Lyoya's case, for many, represents a measure of the steep challenges that persist.
Yet for those who knew Lyoya, he is not a symbol. They knew him as a son, a brother and a father — a person of faith whose life was inextricably shaped by war. They remember him as someone who was quiet and kind, someone who loved music and soccer, but someone who loved his two children above everything else.
He worked hard and brought others joy
Lyoya was born in Congo — the first of Peter and Dorcas Lyoya's six children. In an interview with the Detroit Free Press last week, his parents remembered him as a kid who always brought them joy.
"He is the type of person that you will love to be around," Dorcas Lyoya said, adding that he excelled at putting her "in a good mood to make me laugh."
Lyoya was born at a moment when war was just beginning to split their nation — a conflict with roots in the genocide in neighboring Rwanda and which ultimately resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. The war would end in 1997, but only one year later a new conflict would erupt. Known as the Great War of Africa, it would last until 2003 and cost an estimated 3.8 million lives by one count.
War took the family from their home, and for 11 years they lived in a refugee camp, according to Robert Womack, a member of the Kent County Board of Commissioners in Grand Rapids who has been helping organize a funeral service for Lyoya scheduled for Friday. They were living in Malawi when they won asylum to live in the U.S., arriving in 2014 as part of a wave of refugees settling in Michigan from Congo.
In Grand Rapids, Lyoya's parents landed odd jobs to make ends meet. Dorcas worked in a laundromat; Peter worked in a nursing home.
Lyoya, who was just entering adulthood around the time of the family's U.S. arrival, soon went to work too. He worked in a small manufacturing plant helping to make auto parts, his father told the Detroit Free Press. He also worked at a turkey farm, according to Womack, as well as at a vacuum cleaner and appliance store.
Ramazani Malisawa, 33, says he worked with Lyoya at the appliance store for about six months starting around 2018. Malisawa, who is also from Congo, says they would often eat lunch together and talk about their lives in Africa and how it was they arrived in the United States. But he says these talks would only happen around lunch, because when it came to work, Lyoya was intensely focused.
"When he is working, he was not talking," Malisawa said. "He was just focused on the work. He was a good worker and worked hard."
It's not that he was in love with the job, Malisawa said, but that it was important for him to be able to one day afford to send his two young daughters to school. He said he remembered Lyoya once telling him: "My kids, they will know we had a father, and our father — he worked hard."
Outside of work, Lyoya enjoyed soccer, music and dancing. Womack said Lyoya would even teach Congolese dance traditions in clubs around Grand Rapids, and he shared the story of one local club owner who once watched Lyoya giving lessons.
"They said basically it was just peaceful and a joy," according to Womack. "And even though some of the Americans that worked there didn't understand the language, they said the vibe was just priceless ... the vibe of joy in watching Patrick and his friends laugh and smile and dance."
Lyoya also found community through his faith. Mukalay, the pastor at Restoration Community Church, said Lyoya wasn't like many of the young adults he meets at the church.
"Some young people, they just come and then one day, two days, one month and then they quit or they just drop out," Mukalay said. "He was ready to continue with us for a long time. So that's why I say he was a young [man] who had the decision to do something better in life."
His death has devastated the refugee community
Community leaders like Womack and Mukalay said Lyoya's death has been particularly painful for the city's Congolese population — a community that came to the U.S. to escape violence and felt they had found safety after years of war. It's a grief, they say, that has forever changed their view of America.
"The difference between the Congolese families and some of the African American families who've been affected by state violence is the fact that the Congolese families are hurt and shocked that this could happen in the United States of America," said Womack. "When I deal with African American families, they are hurt and mad, but they're never shocked."
It's a sentiment Lyoya's mother shared with reporters during an April 14 news conference when the family called for criminal charges to be brought against the officer who killed her son. The shooting is under investigation by the Michigan State Police, but authorities have not released the name of the officer.
"I thought that we came to a safe land, a haven, a safe place," she said, speaking through an interpreter. "And I start thinking now, I'm surprised and astonished to see that my friend — it is here that my son has been killed with bullets."
"I was thinking it was my son who would bury me," she said, "but I am the one burying my son."
A vigil for Berta Cáceres, who was murdered on March 3, 2016, in Honduras. (photo: ET)
Seventy-five percent of the murders of the human rights and environmental activists that occurred in the world in 2020 took place in this region.
According to the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), 75 percent of the murders of the human rights and environmental activists that occurred in the world in 2020 took place in Latin America.
In that year, the Latin American cases, which were mainly linked to the rejection of the activities of transnational corporations, were registered in Colombia (65) Mexico (30), Brazil (20), Honduras (17), and Guatemala (13).
In Sept. 2020, for instance, Mexican Indigenous environmentalist leader Oscar Eyraud Adams was assassinated for fighting industries that prompted water scarcity in Baja California.
Later, in Feb. 2021, Brazilian teacher Isac Tembe was killed for opposing the escalation of logging activities in the Amazon rainforest. In Jan. 2022, Honduran environmentalist Melvin Mejia was shot dead for fighting to defend the Tolupan lands from international companies.
To counteract such situation, the UNHRC urged regional authorities to adopt policies that guarantee not only the integral sanction of all crimes against environmental leaders but also the prevention and integral reparation of the victims’ relatives.
"Authorities are primarily responsible for the investigation of these crimes. If they do not assume such obligations, environmentalist struggles will continue to be bathed in blood," the UN Council stated.
Uganda's Bwindi Impenetrable National Park is a sanctuary for half of the world's remaining population of endangered mountain gorillas, alongside forest elephants and many other species. (photo: Brian Harries/Flickr)
The Ministry of Works and Transport is finalizing designs for a new road that will cut through the park’s western edge. The ministry also plans to pave the Ruhija road, an existing path crossing the park’s eastern flank which becomes virtually unpassable during the rainy season.
Most conservationists don’t dispute the need for better roads in the region, but say they’re concerned about the impact on the park’s wildlife. They warn the roads could deny wildlife access to chunks of habitat and deepen the human footprint over a wider area.
“From a development angle, it’s such a small area, yet from a conservation perspective, it is huge,” Brian Atuheire, executive director of the NGO AIFE-Uganda, told Mongabay. “Implementing the road project could endanger the gorillas and destroy the gains made in their conservation.”
A hitherto impenetrable park
Bwindi, spanning 321 square kilometers (125 square miles), lies in the southwest corner of Uganda, hugging the country’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo. There is also a designated nature reserve across the border.
Bwindi is home to the dense montane forests of the Albertine Rift and swaths of lowland forests, showcasing hundreds of tree and fern varieties as well as more than 300 species of birds and butterflies. The high-altitude woodland hosts around 450 mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei). Bwindi also marks the eastern edge of the critically endangered forest elephant’s (Loxodonta cyclotis) range.
According to a 2020 assessment by the IUCN, there are persistent tensions between local residents and park authorities over benefits from tourism and access to the protected area, which many people depend on for food and firewood.
But for many in neighboring communities, what’s of interest isn’t in the park but across from it.
Both of the proposed all-weather roads would improve transport between settlements in Kisoro and Kabale, south of the park, and those to the north, particularly in Kanungu district. To get to Kanungu at present requires traveling either along the unpaved Ruhija road through the forest on the east, or via a long detour around the western boundary of the park. This western route goes past near border areas of the eastern DRC, where a succession of armed groups have long operated, carrying out attacks on soldiers, civilians, and wildlife.
The government plans to build a surfaced road that cuts through the park for 3 kilometers (1.9 miles).
“The proposed new road will significantly impact connectivity of Bwindi Impenetrable National Park with the contiguous Sarambwe Nature Reserve in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo,” the International Gorilla Conservation Programme (IGCP) said in a statement. “This area is a known transboundary home range for the mountain gorillas, chimpanzees and other species.” The IGCP is a coalition of international conservation organizations that includes WWF and Conservation International, working in Uganda since 1991.
Nelson Guma, chief warden at Bwindi National Park Service, agrees. “There are issues of fragmentation of gorilla habitat, roads that dissect the habitat limit their range.”
Infrastructure projects in conservation areas pose a particular risk to ape populations, according to a 2018 report from the Arcus Foundation. By allowing easier access to hitherto remote areas, such developments can open up these areas to both increased poaching and agricultural expansion that eats into valuable habitat.
But the most immediate danger is from traffic accidents. The unpaved Ruhija road is frequented mainly by people on foot and on bicycles and only occasionally by cars and trucks. The risk of animals being struck is further lowered because motorists are forced to drive slowly due to the poor condition of the existing road.
Locals need better infrastructure
Christine Ampumuza, a Ugandan researcher, investigated the controversy around the Ruhija road in Bwindi. “We don’t have a road, we have an animal track,” villagers from communities around the park told her. Others described the difficulties of negotiating a muddy, potholed road on a motorcycle to reach the nearest hospital. “Whenever we had a discussion, they always say: our women are dying. If someone is in labor, and you are delayed, anything can happen,” said Ampumuza, who studies tourism and conservation at Kabale University.
Until recently, there was no regular public transport. The private operators who provide such services were unwilling to bear the maintenance costs of running their vehicles on the route, said Ampumuza, who conducted her research between 2017 and 2019. Repairs to the worst stretches of the Ruhija road in recent years, have allowed regular public transport, enabling better access to health care facilities as well as schools and markets.
“All-season roads are a long-standing demand of the people here,” Ampumuza said.
Between 2008 and 2020, the paved road network in Uganda grew from 3,000 km to 5,591 km (1,860 mi to 3,474 mi). Despite this, most rural residents in Uganda still don’t have access to well-maintained paved roads.
The region’s road infrastructure problems hit national headlines in 2015 when Kizza Besigye, a political rival of Uganda’s president, Yoweri Museveni, got stuck on the Ruhija road and turned it into a campaign issue. Museveni himself has campaigned on building better roads.
The government committed to upgrading “tourism roads” as far back as 2012. The Uganda National Roads Authority (UNRA) identified roads around Bwindi, including the Ruhija road, for improvement. Bwindi is one of the country’s top tourist destinations, and bad roads were described as a major hurdle to realizing its full potential. “A guest does not pay more than 2,000 dollars for a gorilla viewing trip to break their backs on that bumpy road; they need a comfortable trip,” a tourism ministry official told Ampumuza during her research.
Yet a decade later, the Ruhija road remains unpaved. The UNRA blamed the wildlife authority, the UWA, for the delays, since the latter has opposed both of the road development projects. The wildlife agency works closely with the IGCP, a major supporter of conservation efforts in Bwindi. According to Ampumuza, the IGCP offered to help raise funds for an alternative road that would go around the park.
Alternative routes would link more settlements; hence, they would serve more people, the IGCP said in a 2015 analysis. In its study, the IGCP argued that paving the Ruhija road could end up costing the country twice as much as the IGCP’s suggested routes.
“If you keep the road inside the park, it will not have any economic value, but if it goes outside, it benefits the communities as well,” Bwindi chief warden Guma said.
The UNRA has not pursued the IGCP’s proposal. Building a route around the park would involve securing more land from villagers in a densely populated area and increase the construction cost, Ampumuza pointed out.
For the new Nteko-Buhoma road, the IGCP is insisting on a comprehensive environmental and social impact assessment, and that the recommendations of such an assessment be fully implemented. Consultations on both road projects are ongoing and construction is not expected to start any time soon.
Atuheire said he didn’t see the road project as a conflict between development and conservation, especially if the roadwork ends up harming wildlife populations that attract tourists in the first place. “We should abandon the so-called development by building the Nteko-Buhoma Road and go with conservation,” Atuheire said. “All conservationists should say ‘no’ to the construction of this road.”
Ampumuza found villagers she interviewed were willing to take a middle path. “People are ready to compromise for the environment but losing human lives becomes too much to give,” she said. Some suggested a compromise of their own: pave the road outside the park and leave the path inside Bwindi as an “animal track.”
This article was originally published on Mongabay
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