24 June 22
Live on the homepage now!
Reader Supported News
“As you know, Leonard Peltier has spent over 40 years of his life in prison despite the fact that the government has admitted they do not know who is responsible for the crime he was convicted of,” Sanders said in the June 8 email. “Despite national and international campaigns to free Peltier, he remains incarcerated, where he continues to advocate for the rights of native peoples.”
“For this reason, I have and will continue to strongly support petitions for Leonard Peltier’s release,” Sanders concludes.
A constituent passed the letter to HuffPost. A Sanders spokesperson confirmed its legitimacy, but did not provide further comment on the senator’s views on Peltier’s imprisonment.
The letter means that Sanders is the fourth U.S. senator in recent months to advocate for President Joe Biden to give clemency to the now-77-year-old, ailing activist and send him home. Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) and Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) have separately and publicly called on Biden to release Peltier.
If you haven’t heard of Peltier, think of him as America’s longest-serving political prisoner — a fall guy that the FBI and U.S. Attorney’s Office desperately needed after failing to figure out who murdered two FBI agents in a 1975 shootout on Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
If you have heard of Peltier, then you know how problematic his imprisonment is: The blatant 1970s-era racism against Indigenous people that he was up against. The fact that all of Peltier’s co-defendants were acquitted based on self-defense. The reality that the FBI was at least partly responsible for the shootout that day. The admission of U.S. government officials that Peltier’s trial was so flawed he should be released. The decades of outcry from Indigenous leaders, members of Congress, celebrities and human rights leaders, including Pope Francis, the Dalai Lama, Nelson Mandela, Coretta Scott King and Amnesty International, an organization otherwise focused on political prisoners in other countries.
Today, the bottom line is simple: An elderly Indigenous man has been in prison for 46 years and never should have been there in the first place.
A White House official would not say whether Biden is considering granting clemency to Peltier, whose attorneys filed a clemency petition last summer.
“We are aware of the request but do not have further comment at this time,” said this official.
A recent article reporting on the arrests in El Salvador commented that there were so many arrested that the prison population was 2nd only to the US!
Mass incarceration is expensive and unnecessary.
Notice who is funding the campaigns to unseat progressive district attorneys.
It's wealthy donors who fund Republicans.
Of the RECALL OF CHESA BOUDIN:
Over the past two years, Oberndorf has been the biggest donor to the Neighbors for a Better San Francisco super PAC, which has spent just over $1.8 million on pushing the Boudin recall, of which over $900,000 came from Oberndorf.
But it's not just the recall -- Oberndorf has been involved with GOP political movements for years:
In 2020, he donated millions of dollars to Congressional Republicans and Mitch McConnell's PAC for GOP Senate candidates.
In 2012, he spent lavishly to fight teacher's unions.
In 2016, he spent $100,000 fighting a universal Pre-K program that would've been funded by people who make over $400,000 a year.
He gave the maximum individual contribution to A.G. candidate Anne Marie Schubert who is running as a "tough-on-crime" prosecutor and has been critical of our efforts to reform the system.
excerpt:
We turn now to California to look at the effort to recall Chesa Boudin, the district attorney of San Francisco. Boudin was elected in 2019 on a platform to end cash bail and curb mass incarceration. He’s part of a growing number of prosecutors around the country who have vowed to use the district attorney’s seat to end tough-on-crime tactics and restore civil rights.
During his time in the office, Boudin has taken many historic actions, from charging an officer for manslaughter to creating a wrongful conviction unit that recently led to the freedom of a man wrongfully imprisoned for 32 years. Chesa Boudin has also cut the juvenile jail population in half.
But his efforts to reform the system have faced a backlash, funded in part by the real estate industry and ultra-wealthy donors. Key backers of the recall include the billionaire Republican donor William Oberndorf; former PayPal executive David Sacks; Ron Conway, an early Doordash investor; and Garry Tan, an investor in Instacart.
https://www.rsn.org/001/we-cant-jail-our-way-out-of-poverty-san-francisco-da-chesa-boudin-defends-record-ahead-of-recall-vote.html
Emboldened by the success of the Chesa Boudin recall that was based on lies, there are campaigns to recall others, beginning with Gascon.
The Carceral Force of Prosecutor Associations, Explained
https://theappeal.org/the-lab/explainers/the-carceral-force-of-prosecutor-associations-explained/
Pro-life supporters celebrate outside the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C., June 24, 2022. (photo: Olivier Douliery/Getty)
ALSO SEE: What Police Could Find Out About Your Illegal Abortion
We are entering an era not just of unsafe abortions but of the widespread criminalization of pregnancy.
Support for abortion has never been higher, with more than two-thirds of Americans in favor of retaining Roe, and fifty-seven per cent affirming a woman’s right to abortion for any reason. Even so, there are Republican officials who have made it clear that they will attempt to pass a federal ban on abortion if and when they control both chambers of Congress and the Presidency. Anyone who can get pregnant must now face the reality that half of the country is in the hands of legislators who believe that your personhood and autonomy are conditional—who believe that, if you are impregnated by another person, under any circumstance, you have a legal and moral duty to undergo pregnancy, delivery, and, in all likelihood, two decades or more of caregiving, no matter the permanent and potentially devastating consequences for your body, your heart, your mind, your family, your ability to put food on the table, your plans, your aspirations, your life.
“We won’t go back”—it’s an inadequate rallying cry, only prompted by events that belie its message. But it is true in at least one sense. The future that we now inhabit will not resemble the past before Roe, when women sought out illegal abortions and not infrequently found death. The principal danger now lies elsewhere, and arguably reaches further. We have entered an era not of unsafe abortion but of widespread state surveillance and criminalization—of pregnant women, certainly, but also of doctors and pharmacists and clinic staffers and volunteers and friends and family members, of anyone who comes into meaningful contact with a pregnancy that does not end in a healthy birth. Those who argue that this decision won’t actually change things much—an instinct you’ll find on both sides of the political divide—are blind to the ways in which state-level anti-abortion crusades have already turned pregnancy into punishment, and the ways in which the situation is poised to become much worse.
In the states where abortion has been or will soon be banned, any pregnancy loss past an early cutoff can now potentially be investigated as a crime. Search histories, browsing histories, text messages, location data, payment data, information from period-tracking apps—prosecutors can examine all of it if they believe that the loss of a pregnancy may have been deliberate. Even if prosecutors fail to prove that an abortion took place, those who are investigated will be punished by the process, liable for whatever might be found.
Five years ago, Latice Fisher, a Black mother of three from Mississippi, who made eleven dollars an hour as a police-radio operator, experienced a stillbirth, at roughly thirty-six weeks, at home. When questioned, she acknowledged that she didn’t want more kids and couldn’t afford to take care of more kids. She surrendered her phone to investigators, who scraped it for search data and found search terms regarding mifepristone and misoprostol, i.e., abortion pills.
These pills are among the reasons that we are not going back to the era of coat hangers. They can be prescribed via telemedicine and delivered via mail; allowing for the prescription of an extra dose, they are ninety-five to ninety-eight per cent effective in cases of pregnancy up to eleven weeks, which account for almost ninety per cent of all abortions in the U.S. Already, more than half of all abortions in the country are medication abortions. In nineteen states, doctors are prohibited from providing abortions via telemedicine, but women can seek help from clinicians in other states and abroad, such as Rebecca Gomperts, who leads Aid Access, an organization based in Austria that is openly providing abortion pills to women in prohibition states, and has been safely mailing abortion pills to pregnant people all over the world since 2005, with the organization Women on Web. In advance of the U.S. bans, Gomperts has been promoting advance prescription: sympathetic doctors might prescribe abortion pills for any menstruating person, removing some of the fears—and, possibly, the traceability—that would come with attempting to get the pills after pregnancy. Misoprostol can be prescribed for other issues, such as stomach ulcers, and Gomperts argues that there is no reasonable medical argument against advance prescription. “If you buy bleach in the supermarket, that’s more dangerous,” she has said.
There was no evidence that Latice Fisher took an abortion pill. She maintained that she had experienced a stillbirth—an occurrence in one out of every hundred and sixty pregnancies in the U.S. Nonetheless, she was charged with second-degree murder and held on a hundred-thousand-dollar bond. The district attorney, Scott Colom, had campaigned as a progressive reformer; advocates pushed him to drop the murder charge, and to provide a grand jury with more information about an antiquated, unreliable “float test” that prosecutors had used as a basis for their allegation that Fisher’s baby was born alive. Fisher was eventually cleared of all charges; the ordeal took more than three years.
Even if it remains possible in prohibition states to order abortion pills, doing so will be unlawful. (Missouri recently proposed classifying the delivery or shipment of these pills as drug trafficking. Louisiana just passed a law that makes mailing abortion pills to a resident of the state a criminal offense, punishable by six months’ imprisonment.) In many states, to avoid breaking the law, a woman would have to drive to a state where abortion is legal, have a telemedicine consultation there, and then receive the pills in that state. Many women in Texas have opted for a riskier but easier option: to drive across the border, to Mexico, and get abortion pills from unregulated pharmacies, where pharmacists may issue incorrect advice for usage. Some women who lack the freedom and money to travel out of state, and who might fear the consequences of seeking a clinical confirmation of their gestational stage, will order abortion pills without a clear understanding of how far along they are in pregnancy. Abortion pills are safe and effective, but patients need access to clinical guidance and follow-up care. Women in prohibition states who want to seek medical attention after a self-managed abortion will, as a rule, have to choose between risking their freedom and risking their health.
Both abortion and miscarriage currently occur more than a million times each year in America, and the two events are often clinically indistinguishable. As such, prohibition states will have a profoundly invasive interest in differentiating between them. Some have already laid the groundwork for establishing government databases of pregnant women likely to seek abortions. Last year, Arkansas passed a law called the Every Mom Matters Act, which requires women considering abortion to call a state hotline and requires abortion providers to register all patients in a database with a unique I.D. Since then, six other states have implemented or proposed similar laws. The hotlines are provided by crisis pregnancy centers: typically Christian organizations, many of which masquerade as abortion clinics, provide no health care, and passionately counsel women against abortion. Crisis pregnancy centers are already three times as numerous as abortion clinics in the U.S., and, unlike hospitals, they are not required to protect the privacy of those who come to them. For years, conservative states have been redirecting money, often from funds earmarked for poor women and children, toward these organizations. The data that crisis pregnancy centers are capable of collecting—names, locations, family details, sexual and medical histories, non-diagnostic ultrasound images—can now be deployed against those who seek their help.
If you become pregnant, your phone generally knows before many of your friends do. The entire Internet economy is built on meticulous user tracking—of purchases, search terms—and, as laws modelled on Texas’s S.B. 8 proliferate, encouraging private citizens to file lawsuits against anyone who facilitates an abortion, self-appointed vigilantes will have no shortage of tools to track and identify suspects. (The National Right to Life Committee recently published policy recommendations for anti-abortion states that included criminal penalties for anyone who provides information about self-managed abortion “over the telephone, the internet, or any other medium of communication.”) A reporter for Vice recently spent a mere hundred and sixty dollars to purchase a data set on visits to more than six hundred Planned Parenthood clinics. Brokers sell data that make it possible to track journeys to and from any location—say, an abortion clinic in another state. In Missouri, this year, a lawmaker proposed a measure that would allow private citizens to sue anyone who helps a resident of the state get an abortion elsewhere; as with S.B. 8, the law would reward successful plaintiffs with ten thousand dollars. The closest analogue to this kind of legislation is the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793.
For now, the targets of S.B. 8-type bounty laws are those who provide abortions, not those who seek them. But that seems likely to change. Connecticut, a progressive state on the matter of abortion, recently passed a law that prevents local agencies from coöperating with out-of-state abortion prosecutions and protects the medical records of out-of-state clients. Other progressive states will follow suit. If prohibition states can’t sue out-of-state doctors, and, if abortion pills sent by mail remain largely undetectable, the only people left to target will be abortion advocates and those trying to get abortions. The Stream, a conservative Christian publication, recently advocated mandatory psychiatric custody for women who get abortions. In May, Louisiana advanced a bill that would allow abortion patients to be charged with murder. The proposal was withdrawn, but the threat had been made.
The theological concept of fetal personhood—the idea that, from the moment of conception, an embryo or fetus is a full human being, deserving of equal (or, more accurately, superior) rights—is a foundational doctrine of the anti-abortion movement. The legal ramifications of this idea—including the possible classification of I.V.F., IUDs, and the morning-after pill as instruments of murder—are unhinged, and much harsher than what even the average anti-abortion American is currently willing to embrace. Nonetheless, the anti-abortion movement is now openly pushing for fetal personhood to become the foundation of U.S. abortion law.
If a fetus is a person, then a legal framework can be invented to require someone who has one living inside her to do everything in her power to protect it, including—as happened to Savita Halappanavar, in Ireland, which operated under a fetal-personhood doctrine until 2018, and to Izabela Sajbor, in Poland, where all abortion is effectively illegal—to die. No other such obligation exists anywhere in our society, which grants cops the freedom to stand by as children are murdered behind an unlocked door. In Poland, pregnant women with cancer have been routinely denied chemotherapy because of clinicians’ fears of harming the fetus.
Fetal-personhood laws have passed in Georgia and Alabama, and they are no longer likely to be found unconstitutional. Such laws justify a full-scale criminalization of pregnancy, whereby women can be arrested, detained, and otherwise placed under state intervention for taking actions perceived to be potentially harmful to a fetus. This approach has been steadily tested, on low-income minorities in particular, for the past four decades. National Advocates for Pregnant Women—the organization that has provided legal defense for most of the cases mentioned in this article—has documented almost eighteen hundred cases, from 1973 to 2020, of prosecutions or forced interventions related to pregnancy; this is likely a substantial undercount. Even in states such as California, where the law explicitly prohibits charging women with murder after a pregnancy loss, conservative prosecutors are doing so anyway.
Most pregnancy-related prosecutions, so far, have revolved around drug use. Women who used drugs while pregnant, or sought treatment for drug use during pregnancy, have been charged with child abuse, child neglect, distribution of drugs to a minor, assault with a deadly weapon, manslaughter, and homicide. In 2020, law enforcement in Alabama investigated a woman named Kim Blalock for chemical endangerment of a child after she told delivery-room staff that she had been taking prescribed hydrocodone for pain management. (The district attorney charged her with prescription fraud—a felony—before eventually dropping the prosecution altogether.) There has been a string of shocking recent prosecutions in Oklahoma, in which women who used drugs have been charged with manslaughter for miscarrying well before the point of viability. In Wisconsin, state law already allows juvenile courts to take a fetus—meaning a pregnant woman—into custody for the fetus’s protection, resulting in the detention and forced treatment of more than four hundred pregnant women every year on the suspicion that they may be consuming controlled substances. A proposed law in Wyoming would create a specific category of felony child endangerment for drug use while pregnant, a law that resembles Tennessee’s former Fetal Assault Law. The Tennessee law was discontinued after two years, because treating women as adversaries to the fetuses they carry has a chilling effect on prenatal medicine, and inevitably results in an increase in maternal and infant death.
The mainstream pro-choice movement has largely ignored the growing criminalization of pregnancy, just as it has generally ignored the inadequacy of Roe. (It took Joe Biden, who campaigned on making Roe the “law of the land,” more than a year to say the word “abortion” on the record after he became President; the Democrats, given the chance to override the filibuster and codify Roe in May, predictably failed to do so.) Many of those who support the right to abortion have tacitly accepted that poor and minority women in conservative states lost access to abortion long before this Supreme Court decision, and have quietly hoped that the thousands of women facing arrest after pregnancy, miscarriage, stillbirth, or even healthy deliveries were unfortunate outliers. They were not outliers, and, as the columnist Rebecca Traister noted last month, the chasm between the impervious class and everyone else is growing every day.
Pregnancy is more than thirty times more dangerous than abortion. One study estimates that a nationwide ban would lead to a twenty-one-per-cent rise in pregnancy-related deaths. Some of the women who will die from abortion bans are pregnant right now. Their deaths will come not from back-alley procedures but from a silent denial of care: interventions delayed, desires disregarded. They will die of infections, of preëclampsia, of hemorrhage, as they are forced to submit their bodies to pregnancies that they never wanted to carry, and it will not be hard for the anti-abortion movement to accept these deaths as a tragic, even noble, consequence of womanhood itself.
In the meantime, abortion bans will hurt, disable, and endanger many people who wanted to carry their pregnancies to term but who encounter medical difficulties. Physicians in prohibition states have already begun declining to treat women who are in the midst of miscarriages, for fear that the treatment could be classified as abortion. One woman in Texas was told that she had to drive fifteen hours to New Mexico to have her ectopic pregnancy—which is nonviable, by definition, and always dangerous to the mother—removed. Misoprostol, one of the abortion pills, is routinely prescribed for miscarriage management, because it causes the uterus to expel any remaining tissue. Pharmacists in Texas, fearing legal liability, have already refused to prescribe it. If a miscarriage is not managed to a safe completion, women risk—among other things, and taking the emotional damage for granted—uterine perforation, organ failure, infection, infertility, and death.
Most miscarriages are caused by factors beyond a pregnant person’s control: illnesses, placental or uterine irregularities, genetic abnormalities. But the treatment of pregnant people in this country already makes many of them feel directly and solely responsible for the survival of their fetus. They are told to absolutely avoid alcohol, coffee, retinol, deli turkey, unpasteurized cheese, hot baths, vigorous exercise, drugs that are not prescribed to them, drugs that they have been prescribed for years—often without any explanation of the frequently shoddy reasoning behind these prohibitions. Structural factors that clearly increase the likelihood of miscarriage—poverty, environmental-chemical exposure, working night shifts—are less likely to come up. As fetal personhood becomes law in more of the land, pregnant people, as Lynn Paltrow, the director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, has pointed out, “could be sued, or prevented from engaging in travel, work, or any activity that is believed to create a risk to the life of the unborn.”
Half a century ago, the anti-abortion movement was dominated by progressive, antiwar, pro-welfare Catholics. Today, the movement is conservative, evangelical, and absolutely single-minded, populated overwhelmingly by people who, although they may embrace foster care, adoption, and various forms of private ministry, show no interest in pushing for public, structural support for human life once it’s left the womb. The scholar Mary Ziegler recently noted that today’s anti-abortion advocates see the “strategies of earlier decades as apologetic, cowardly, and counterproductive.” During the past four years, eleven states have passed abortion bans that contain no exceptions for rape or incest, a previously unthinkable extreme.
In Texas, already, children aged nine, ten, and eleven, who don’t yet understand what sex and abuse are, face forced pregnancy and childbirth after being raped. Women sitting in emergency rooms in the midst of miscarriages are being denied treatment for sepsis because their fetuses’ hearts haven’t yet stopped. People you’ll never hear of will spend the rest of their lives trying and failing, agonizingly, in this punitive country, to provide stability for a first or fifth child they knew they weren’t equipped to care for.
In the face of all this, there has been so much squeamishness even in the pro-choice camp—a tone that casts abortion as an unfortunate necessity; an approach to messaging which values choice but devalues abortion care itself, which emphasizes reproductive rights rather than reproductive justice. That approach has landed us here. We are not going back to the pre-Roe era, and we should not want to go back to the era that succeeded it, which was less bitter than the present but was never good enough. We should demand more, and we will have to. We will need to be full-throated and unconditional about abortion as a necessary precondition to justice and equal rights if we want even a chance of someday getting somewhere better.
Russia's tactics include bullying ammunition sellers not to deliver to Ukraine and secretly blowing up depots across Eastern Europe. (photo: Marius Bosch/Reuters)
The tactics include bullying ammunition sellers not to deliver to Ukraine and secretly blowing up depots across Eastern Europe prior to this spring’s invasion, The Washington Post reports, citing Ukraine Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Malyar.
Russia and Ukraine use the same artillery, thanks to their common military hardware that dates back to the Soviet era. It’s a specific type of of ammo, mostly consisting of 122mm and 152mm caliber rounds, which are no longer common in modern warfare.
The Post found that Russia has for years been making sure Ukraine is not only in short supply, but experiencing difficulty resupplying. “Even if everyone gives us this ammunition, it will still not be enough,” Malyar told the paper. Russia pops off around 60,000 rounds a day, which is tenfold more than Ukraine has the capacity to fire back. And since the inventory is so specific, the global supply does not have the capacity to meet Ukraine’s wartime demand.
Weapons brokers who are working to covertly supply Ukraine told the Post that they are being regularly threatened with death if they make deliveries, which has acted as a successful deterrent. In other cases, Russian brokers working undercover outbid Ukraine suppliers, adding a further layer of delay. “The Russians are working very hard to ensure that we can’t sign contracts for this,” Malyar told the Post. “And then if we sign a contract, to prevent us from getting the shells delivered here.”
The campaign to keep Ukrainian weapons in short supply began in 2014, after Russian separatists started fighting. That year, a munitions depot in the Czech Republic was sabotaged, which, at the time was hard to link to the Kremlin. A year later, a Bulgarian weapons executive who was selling artillery to Ukraine was poisoned by the same unit that sabotaged the Czech depot, according to the investigative group Bellingcat.
And Bulgarian prosecutors now believe that four mysterious explosions at arms depots between 2011 and 2020 were sparked by Russia in preparation for the war now in its fourth month.
Similar targeted attacks of weapons depots in Ukraine in 2017 are now thought to be tied to Russia’s shadow war, according to the Post’s reporting.
A framed picture of Berta Cáceres sits on an altar in her honor as activists demand justice after her murder outside the Honduran Embassy in Mexico City, on June 15, 2016. (photo: Eduardo Verdugo/AP)
Newly Released Documents Reveal International Funding Trail Preceding the Murder of Berta Cáceres
Two years earlier, the Dutch-state-owned bank FMO had signed on to finance the controversial Honduran Agua Zarca dam project. Led by a company called Desarrollos Energéticos Sociedad Anónima, or DESA, the dam was the joint effort of David Castillo and Daniel Atala Midence, the company’s respective CEO and CFO. Cáceres, a renowned environmental activist and leader in the Indigenous Lenca community, was the driving force behind the protests against it.
A trove of Dutch and U.S. legal and financial documents shared with The Intercept reveal, for the first time, the flow of international funding in the days leading up to March 2, 2016, when a hit squad broke into Cáceres’s house and killed her. The bank provided the documents to two Dutch human rights lawyers, Wout Albers and Ron Rosenhart Rodriguez, who have spent the past two years representing Cáceres’s family and COPINH, the organization she co-founded, in a civil lawsuit that seeks to hold FMO accountable for its role in the Agua Zarca project. (The suit was first filed in the Netherlands in 2018; Albers and Rosenhart came on in 2020.)
In at least four instances, according to the records, the bank released funding to a company affiliated with Castillo and Atala that did not match the stated payee, routing the money through an offshore account with Deutsche Bank in New York City.
Castillo, who was convicted of being a co-collaborator in Cáceres’s killing in 2021 and sentenced to 22 years and six months in prison on Monday, held leadership positions and financial stakes in several companies beyond DESA. These included PEMSA, a Panamanian shell company with anonymous shareholders, and CONCASA, a concrete company which provides almost no information about its activity in the Honduran corporate registry. His business partner, Atala, is a member of the powerful Atala Zablah family, who preside over a banking and private industry empire almost without parallel in Honduras. No member of the Atala Zablah family has been charged in connection with Cáceres’s killing.
It was Atala who directed the $1.7 million payment to the concrete company Concretos del Caribe S.A., or CONCASA, though another firm was listed as the intended recipient, the documents reveal. Hours after the loan landed, Castillo, in WhatsApp communications released by the Honduran public prosecutor and previously reported on by The Intercept, texted the head of the hit squad that payment was coming, because “the loan [we] requested is available.” It is not known whether Castillo was referring to the loan proceeds sent to CONCASA.
Less than 48 hours later, Berta Cáceres was dead.
“Chats between Castillo and the leader of the hit squad suggest that a few days before [the killing] they didn’t have the funds yet,” Albers, the lead attorney on the case, said to The Intercept. “After the payment, authorized by FMO and carried out by Deutsche Bank as an offshore bank, they did.”
Asked about the bank’s oversight of the payments, FMO spokesperson Monica Beek wrote in a statement: “In view of the legal proceedings that COPINH has started, a response belongs primarily within the framework of a careful judicial process, and not now, selectively and without context.” She referred The Intercept to FMO’s website for further information.
Before Castillo, seven out of the eight men tried for carrying out the hit were convicted of murder in 2018 and later sentenced to 30 to 50 years in prison. But more than six years after Cáceres’s death, family members and human rights workers allege that the killing’s most powerful authors are still at large.
“The practices of these financial institutions … are really surprising to us,” said “Bertita” Zúñiga Cáceres of the revelations. As the current general coordinator of Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations, or COPINH, she is continuing the work that her mother, Berta, started.
“These transfers weren’t just irregular,” Zúñiga Cáceres told The Intercept. “They were used practically so the owners of DESA could use that money for their own whims — without having any verification measures, without knowing how the transfers were being executed. It’s shocking, knowing that [the money] went to places and to sources that they shouldn’t have been going to, for things that weren’t consensual.”
In 2015, Cáceres rocketed herself to world fame — and DESA to infamy — when she won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, or the “Green Nobel,” for leading the Indigenous resistance to the Agua Zarca dam construction. As an activist, she helped unite Honduras’s social movements into a common resistance front against the right-wing regimes that took power after Honduran security forces carried out a 2009 coup. The forced transfer of power brought with it a murderous spike in general and state violence, earning public condemnation from the Obama administration — though the State Department never officially classified it as a military coup. The Honduran forces’ deep ties to the United States were well established, and later reporting revealed that then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had sought communication with the interim, post-coup government.
In the years since, Honduras has seen scores of assassinations of land and water defenders, many of them Indigenous or Afro-Indigenous, who opposed mining, agro-business, and dam projects which they argued would displace them from their lands. Many of these projects lacked consulta previa, or “prior consultation,” from Indigenous groups, as required under international conventions to which the Honduran government is party. Yet they still received support from transnational financial institutions, such as the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, or — in the case of the Agua Zarca project — FMO in the Netherlands.
FMO prides itself on investing in poor countries plagued by violence and corruption, funneling money into development projects where the “country … lacks financial infrastructure or is perceived as too ‘fragile’ by private investors.” The opportunity to support the Agua Zarca project seemed right up their alley.
Incorporated shortly before the 2009 coup and contracted for the Agua Zarca project soon after, DESA was jointly owned by Castillo — a business executive and U.S.-trained former Honduran army intelligence officer — and the powerful Atala Zablah family. When FMO agreed to provide the Agua Zarca loan, it said that the money would go to contractors building the dam and not to DESA itself, nor to any transaction with an affiliate, defined as a company that is directly or indirectly controlled by DESA.
In 2013, Indigenous Lenca residents began protesting the dam. They said they hadn’t received consulta previa and alleged the project would displace them from the sacred Gualcarque River. Led by Cáceres and COPINH, protests intensified over the following two years — as did repression. The military killed an anti-dam protester in 2013, and private security contractors later descended on anti-dam blockades.
The violence ultimately led several partners and lenders to withdraw from the project. Sinohydro, a Chinese state-owned company and the largest dam-builder in the world, left in 2013; COPRECA, a Guatemalan construction firm, left in 2014.
But none of that stopped FMO from investing. Around 2011, a number of parties approached the bank about the prospect of supporting Agua Zarca. One was the Central American Bank for Economic Integration, or CABEI, of which José Eduardo Atala Zablah — from the same family invested in Agua Zarca and a former DESA board member — was formerly the Honduran director. Members of the Atala Zablah family did not respond to The Intercept’s attempts to reach them for comment.
On February 27, 2014, FMO, with participation from a Finnish development financier, Finnfund, agreed to loan $20,000,000 to finance the Agua Zarca project. Under the same agreement, another $24,400,000 would come from CABEI, which was listed as the administrative agent.
The debt to those banks would constitute 70 percent of the project’s estimated $63.4 million budget. The other 30 percent would be financed through equity, comprising shares owned by Inversiones las Jacarandas, an investment company owned by six members of the Atala Zablah family, as well as Potencia y Energía de Mesoamérica S.A., a Panamanian shell company run by Castillo. PEMSA has 100 percent bearer shares, meaning its shareholders can’t be verified based on public records.
As a part of the loan agreement, FMO and CABEI agreed to have their money transferred to DESA through a third-party offshore account with Deutsche Bank, listed in the agreement as the “Offshore Security Agent,” in New York City.
“Marina [Pannekeet, an FMO employee] wanted me to have a reserve account,” David Castillo later wrote to Daniel Atala in WhatsApp conversations extracted by Honduras’s public prosecutor.
“She doesn’t want us to ever see the money,” Atala replied.
In 2016, FMO energy director Elvira Eurlings told Dutch journalists that the bank warmed to the idea of financing DESA in part because of its connections to the people behind it. “We knew the two families behind the DESA project as good businessmen with a good reputation,” Eurlings said. “They were not on any blacklist — there was no corruption or criminal activity.” Reached for comment, FMO did not address The Intercept’s request to clarify who the two families were.
Cáceres was murdered almost two years to the date after FMO signed the loan. Amid a wave of media scrutiny, the bank withdrew from the project. But FMO didn’t stop defending its support for the dam — until Castillo’s guilty verdict last year.
“FMO financed a company whose CEO has now been found guilty of being involved in murder,” read a statement published on the bank’s website. “We are devastated by this. In hindsight, we wish we would never have invested in the Agua Zarca project.”
But FMO, Albers and Rosenhart argue, should have known something was amiss. The documents they shared with The Intercept illustrate that FMO’s internal records with the Deutsche Bank offshore account — to which both banks had direct and repeated access, and which in some cases were signed by an FMO representative — show the Honduran loan beneficiaries repeatedly listing one payee for the wire transfers, then directing the transfers to another. Under this process, FMO ended up sending millions of dollars to CONCASA.
For the first of these payments — on a document titled “Construction Requisition No. 1” and dated November 12, 2014 — Castillo requested the wiring of over $1.4 million to COPRECA, the Guatemalan-based construction company that would go on to leave the Agua Zarca project at the end of that year. The payment appears to have landed with COPRECA as intended.
After a few more transactions, Daniel Atala signed off on a document titled “Construction Requisition No. 5” and dated June 9, 2015, in which he requested over $3.6 million for COPRECA. By that time, COPRECA had left the Agua Zarca project. On the same page, the payment instructions direct the money to a separate company: “Concretos del Caribe SA,” or CONCASA. (In January 2016, Castillo gave Daniel Atala administrative control over CONCASA.)
FMO declined to elaborate on these transactions.
Albers and Rosenhart say that failure to report transactions that may seem suspicious carries potential legal implications. In the Netherlands, for one, the Wwft law (which is the Dutch acronym for, roughly, “Anti-Money Laundering and Anti-Terrorist Financing Act”) requires any bank, lawyer, or investment institution to report “unusual transactions” to the country’s Financial Intelligence Unit. Failure to do so constitutes a potential “economic crime” under Dutch law.
The payments carried on. In a September 14, 2015, document titled “Construction Requisition No. 6” Castillo requested nearly $1 million for COPRECA, while listing the account beneficiary name as CONCASA.
G.W. de Boer, a manager at FMO Bank, personally signed off on this document, as did Castillo. (Later, on page 446 of its 676-page Dutch language response, FMO contradicted this by saying, “All parties to which money was provided were known to FMO.” The reply lists COPRECA as a loan recipient but does not mention CONCASA.)
The payments to CONCASA continued that November. On a document titled “Construction Requisition No. 7,” dated November 24, Castillo requested over $2.6 million for COPRECA, again sending it to CONCASA.
By this point, in late 2015, Castillo was already collaborating in the murder plot. Castillo, along with DESA’s former security chief Douglas Bustillo, had organized a hit squad in which Honduran army intelligence chief Mariano Díaz led a former Special Forces sniper, who was once under Díaz’s command, alongside three sicarios, or hired assassins. They failed to kill her on February 5, 2016, after one of the sicarios reported seeing too many people near the house.
“Mission aborted,” Bustillo wrote to Castillo afterward, in phone extracts obtained by the Honduran public prosecutor. “I’ll wait for what you promised, because I don’t have logistics [money] anymore. I’m at zero.”
But the logistics would come soon. The mission was less than a month away from success.
On a final document titled “Construction Requisition No. 9,” dated February 23, 2016, Daniel Atala requested the withdrawal of over $1.7 million. Once again, the request listed the recipient of the money as COPRECA while on the same page directing it to CONCASA. The document bore the signature of G.W. de Boer, the FMO manager.
According to phone extracts obtained by the public prosecutor, at around 1 a.m. on March 1, Castillo texted Bustillo that he could give him the money later that morning because “tonight they pay me and I can have the requested loan available.”
On March 2, Bustillo’s assassin squad left the coastal city of La Ceiba. They arrived in Cáceres’s hometown, La Esperanza, in the evening. Just before midnight, they burst into her home and murdered her.
As reporters began investigating the case, the screws were soon turned on DESA. Out of four suspects arrested in May 2016 in relation to the killing, one was a DESA employee. FMO stuck to its narrative: Though Berta’s killing was a tragedy, the bank’s financing of Agua Zarca was still a net benefit for the community.
In July 2017, in response to tensions over the project, FMO and Finnfund announced they would officially end their involvement with Agua Zarca. They forgave the loan on their way out, essentially gifting the dam effort with over $6.1 million dollars. According to page 546 of the Dutch-language reply, “FMO and FinnFund had to give up the repayments on their loans and the interest on those loans in order to reach an Exit.”
Funds from CONCASA had provided other support for the project: While police guarded the construction site, transfers taken from the concrete company were written out for furniture to keep the police presence comfortable. As reflected in documents released by the Honduran public prosecutor, money from CONCASA paid the salary of Sergio Rodríguez, a former DESA manager convicted of orchestrating Cáceres’s murder, while he was detained awaiting trial.
On February 29, 2016 — six days after the $1.7 million loan request and two days before the killing — Daniel Atala ordered $1.2 million to be transferred from CONCASA’s bank account with BAC Credomatic in Honduras to PEMSA, run by Castillo, in Panama. The day after the killing, PEMSA’s bearer share option, which allowed the shareholders to remain anonymous, was listed as having been terminated in the Panamanian corporate registry.
For Albers and Rosenhart, the rapid succession of these events — payment, killing, and change in ownership structure — was suspicious.
Speaking to The Intercept, Rosenhart argued that the documents raise substantial questions about whether some of the loan money actually went toward the dam project, and that they revealed “severe negligence from the banks to monitor how their loan was spent on the other. They also demonstrate that there are still several lines of financial investigation open for the Honduran, Panamanian, Dutch, and even US authorities to research.”
As it flowed from the Netherlands into Central America, FMO’s money made repeated stops at an offshore account based out of New York City. While Albers and Rosenhart focus on FMO, two U.S.-based lawyers raised questions about whether the Deutsche Bank in New York stands in potential violation of the law as well.
Deutsche Bank did not answer repeated calls from The Intercept seeking comment.
The multinational bank has a history of questionable financial practices. In April 2022, its German offices were raided by the country’s authorities over suspicious activity reports. Over a year earlier, it was forced to pay $43 million to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission after having “failed to implement a system of internal accounting controls,” while leaked documents from 2020 showed that the bank helped launder hundreds of billions of dollars of embezzled money as well as funds connected to organized crime over the past decade.
Deutsche Bank’s failure to report the CONCASA transfers comes as little surprise to Kelsey Jost-Creegan, a Harvard-trained lawyer who works with land defenders in Central America as a part of the legal organization EarthRights International.
Jost-Creegan reviewed the wire transfers to CONCASA and suggested examining them under the Bank Secrecy Act and related regulations, which require U.S. banks and financial institutions to develop and implement anti-money laundering controls.
“The fact that these transactions passed through Deutsche Bank New York means that both U.S. federal and New York State anti-money laundering (AML) laws are implicated,” Jost-Creegan said, arguing the loan transfers were riddled with red flags that should have heightened AML due diligence. In 2015, she pointed out, the U.S. State Department listed Honduras as a “jurisdiction of concern” for money laundering and financial crimes.
“The amount of the transfers surpassed AML thresholds,” she told The Intercept. Like Albers and Rosenhart, Jost-Creegan highlighted the discrepancies between stated payee and beneficiary.
Sarah “Poppy” Alexander, a California-based lawyer who represents financial whistleblowers, was briefed on the transactions and argues that institutions like Deutsche Bank are responsible under U.S. law to report suspicious transactions in suspicious activity reports. “To the extent Deutsche Bank had any reason to fear the transfers were being used for any suspicious purpose, they would normally have to disclose that,” she said. “To the extent the money was moving to a different account, or that was not connected to the dam, that should generally raise questions.”
“If FMO manages to overcome its existential crisis as a development bank, it should re-examine the unethical modus operandi of facilitating foreign multi-millionaires for development, in the hope that some of their money ends up where it can be used for a good cause,” Rosenhart said. “Which, in the case of Agua Zarca, was an illusion from the start.”
The forces behind Agua Zarca belong to a broad network that encompasses some of the wealthiest people in Honduras — including two powerful families whose members have never faced charges in connection to the Cáceres killing.
Several members of the Atala Zablah family are direct blood relatives of the separate, but similarly powerful Atala Faraj family. Six Atala Zablah siblings — all of whom were shareholders in “Inversiones las Jacarandas,” itself the majority shareholder of DESA — are first cousins of the billionaire Camilo Atala Faraj. Three of those siblings, as well as one of their sons, were board members or held positions at DESA: Pedro Atala Zablah, owner of CAMOSA, Honduras’s John Deere distributor, and co-president of Motagua Football Club; Jacobo Atala Zablah, president of BAC Credomatic Honduras bank; José Eduardo Atala Zablah, formerly the Honduran director of CABEI and current co-president of Motagua Football Club. José Eduardo’s son is Daniel Atala Midence, who was the CFO of DESA and had administrative control over CONCASA after January 2016, when it received the final payments of FMO money.
José Eduardo Atala Zablah, Pedro Atala Zablah, and Daniel Atala Midence were all part of a corporate WhatsApp group with David Castillo titled “Seguridad PHAZ” that discussed DESA security, media strategy, and the group’s relationship with Cáceres in the days surrounding her murder.
For years, U.S.-based lawyers working on behalf of the Atala Faraj family have demanded corrections from journalists investigating Cáceres’s assassination, saying that the two families are separate and that the Atala Faraj family had nothing to do with the dam. Camilo Atala Faraj, the owner of FICOHSA bank, is one of the wealthiest men in Honduras. David Castillo, Daniel Atala Midence, and DESA board members have referred to FICOHSA loans in WhatsApp conversations presented by Honduras’s public prosecutor, though FICOHSA has repeatedly denied being involved in the DESA project.
COPINH and Cáceres’s family insist that Castillo is merely the co-author of Cáceres’s assassination. Faltan los Atala, they say of the killing: “The Atalas are missing.” Both the Atala Zablah and the Atala Faraj branches of the family have fiercely and consistently denied this accusation. The Intercept attempted repeatedly to reach the Atala families for comment.
“No one has been investigated for the [financial] irregularities,” said Zúñiga Cáceres. “The search for justice for my mother, our compañera Berta Cáceres, is an opportunity for Honduras to show the nefarious role of these banking entities who speak of a false vision of development, but at the end of the day, are only interested in their pockets, at the expense of the population.”
On May 25, Honduras’s National Congress decreed that Berta Cáceres would be elevated to the status of a national hero. It struck some as strange that she would be placed on a symbolic pedestal, because the systemic problems that led to her death — the violence, corruption, impunity, and extractive projects — remain pervasive. Environmental defenders, after all, continue to be murdered at alarming rates in Honduras. And the full extent of the network that was involved in planning her assassination remains unknown. Some complicit in her killing may still be beyond the reach of justice.
New reports give credence to the claim that Zuckerberg now cares less about securing elections and more about his one true love: the Metaverse. (photo: Daniel Acker/Bloomberg)
New reports give credence to the claim that Zuckerberg now cares less about securing elections and more about his one true love: the Metaverse.
“The most important thing I care about right now is making sure no one interferes in the various 2018 elections around the world,” the Facebook CEO said during a marathon five-hour testimony to Congress in April of that year, where he was grilled about how the Kremlin weaponized Facebook during the 2016 election to spread disinformation and chaos.
Fast-forward to 2022, and Zuckerberg is apparently more concerned about money and the metaverse now.
As the crucial midterm elections approach in the U.S., a pair of new reports give credence to the claim that Zuckerberg now cares less about securing elections and more about his shiny new project.
The New York Times reported Thursday that Zuckerberg no longer meets regularly with his election team anymore and his top priority is, instead, the metaverse project. The report also reveals that the number of employees dedicated to monitoring election threats has been gutted from 300 full-time members in 2020 to just 60 today.
As an example of how this new outlook could allow election conspiracies to spread unchecked on the platform, the New York Times pointed out that Dinesh D’Souza’s conspiracy-filled and debunked film 2000 Mules racked up 430,000 engagements on Facebook this month.
Tracking how disinformation spreads on Facebook can be difficult, but a tool called CrowdTangle, which Facebook purchased in 2018, has become a critical way for researchers and journalists to track new disinformation trends around elections.
Facebook, which has historically been averse to sharing information with researchers, looks to be phasing out this tool now too.
The shutdown of the CrowdTangle began last year with most former employees leaving or being assigned roles in other parts of Meta. In January of this year, Meta paused the ability of new users to register for CrowdTangle, a hold that’s still in place. No new features have been added in the last 16 months and researchers have reported that the tool isn’t working as expected.
The reason for this, according to a Bloomberg report this week, is that fewer than five engineers on Facebook’s London integrity team were working to keep CrowdTangle operational.
This means that there is now very little support for the many organizations that use CrowdTangle, a tool that has also been used by journalists, researchers, academics, and human rights organizations in places like Myanmar and Sri Lanka where Facebook has been accused of facilitating genocide.
Researchers fear things will get worse in November.
It's hard to overstate how much of a disaster it'd be for fact-checkers and reporters if Meta ditched its research tool CrowdTangle for good. My list of stories where it helped our team pick up key misinformation narratives and patterns is very long.https://t.co/aVNVXiA74h
— Shayan Sardarizadeh (@Shayan86) June 24, 2022
A spokesperson for Meta told Bloomberg that CrowdTangle would work for the 2022 midterms just as it did for the 2020 presidential elections, adding that the company has plans to make “even more valuable” tools for researchers, though she didn’t say when those tools would be available.
But, as one expert pointed out, the replacement system proposed by Facebook so far is not up to snuff.
“The system proposed to replace CrowdTangle is—so far—terrible,” Dr. Rebekah Tromble, director of the Institute for Data, Democracy … Politics, tweeted Thursday. “But most importantly, it's inaccessible to journalists, who are the bulwark for public accountability and democracy. If I can access CrowdTangle and journalists can't, we all lose.”
The U.S. midterms are just one election taking place this year. Across the globe, there are dozens of others that remain vulnerable to disinformation shared on Facebook. And aside from elections, there are numerous other events which CrowdTangle could be used to track how dangerous narratives are being shared online.
“This tool was crucial to the analysis of COVID-19 disinformation, threats from the Boogaloo bois following the death of George Floyd, hybrid threats etc.,” Marc-André Argentino, an extremism researcher and Ph.D. candidate at Concordia University, tweeted on Thursday.
“So many colleagues, journalists, and researchers benefit greatly from CrowdTangle.” Facebook still has almost 3 billion monthly users, and for hundreds of millions of Americans, Facebook is still the primary way they communicate online and their main source of news and information.
And with the midterms approaching, Facebook and Zuckerberg’s focus on making money in the Metaverse is a very worrying development.
Colombian left-wing presidential candidate Gustavo Petro and his candidate for vice president Francia Marquez of the Historic Pact coalition celebrate after Petro's victory in the second round of the presidential election, at the Movistar Arena, in Bogota, Colombia, June 19, 2022. (photo: Luisa Gonzalez/Reuters)
Left-wing Gustava Petro’s election victory in Colombia signals the rise of a new brand of socialism in the region.
On Sunday, former Bogota Mayor Gustavo Petro and his candidate for vice president, environmental activist Marquez, made history by securing more than 50 percent of all votes in Colombia’s presidential election and setting themselves up to form the country’s first-ever left-wing, progressive government.
This was not an easy victory. In the second round of the election, Gustavo and Francia ran against right-wing construction magnate Rodolfo Hernandez who had the backing of the outgoing Conservative President Ivan Duque, the right-wing “Centro Democratic” party that has been in power for more than two decades, as well as the media and powerful elites.
Despite running an aggressive and well-funded campaign focused on anti-corruption, however, Hernandez – who is ironically facing corruption allegations of his own – failed to win over enough support to secure the presidency. In an election that saw the highest turnout in Colombian history, millions chose instead to vote for a left-wing anti-establishment duo promising profound social and economic change.
Petro and Marquez’ success was not accidental – years of grassroots organising and left-wing coalition building led to this moment. Indeed, there were signs of a progressive shift in Colombia long before this election.
In late 2019, when the right-wing government of President Duque proposed to lower the minimum wage for workers under 25 years old, young people tired of decades of austerity and marginalisation took to the streets across Colombia, initiating a “paro nacional” (national strike) that brought the country to a standstill. Strike action and protests continued even at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. In April 2021, an increase in taxes, corruption and healthcare reform proposed by the government triggered a new protest wave. People started taking to the streets to demand better education, public transportation and healthcare, and to voice their grievances with the government, in almost all cities. The government responded to the protests with violence. At least 44 protesters were killed and hundreds were injured, according to the United Nations.
When Petro and Marquez started their electoral campaign in 2022, the unmet demands of the “paro nacional” and grassroots protests that followed still occupied the minds of many Colombians. Despite strong resistance from the establishment, people were clearly ready for – and actively demanding – systemic change. Nevertheless, the campaign proposals put forward by Petro and Marquez were still relatively modest: they promised a tax reform that would provide the state with extra funds to spend on efforts to improve the country’s education and health systems and to end Colombia’s fossil fuel dependence through a just energy transition. Still, the right-wing establishment argued that the modest proposal was “too ambitious”, “unrealistic” and even “counterproductive” – perhaps because Petro plans to acquire much-needed extra funds not by increasing taxes on food items like President Duque, but by raising taxes on the country’s 4,000 wealthiest families, removing some corporate tax benefits, raising some import tariffs and targeting tax evaders.
Petro and Marquez’ election victory is the beginning of a new, positive chapter not only in Colombia but the entire region, for several reasons.
First and foremost, Petro won the presidency on a promise to make Colombia a leader in the global fight against climate change. He repeatedly emphasised his determination to better the living standards of Colombians while also working towards saving the Amazon rainforest. In his victory speech, Petro explicitly called upon other progressive leaders in Latin America to make ending their countries’ dependence on fossil fuels a part of their plans for achieving economic and social justice.
What Petro said in his victory speech was a reiteration of the many climate change-related proposals he tabled during his campaign, such as an immediate ban on unconventional oil fields, fracking pilot projects, and the development of offshore wells, and an end to new licences for fossil fuel exploration.
Instead of fossil fuel production and consumption, which has brought so much destruction, displacement and violence to Colombia, Gustavo Petro and Francia Marquez are committed to building a new, green economy. The just energy transition that Colombia is now committed to undertaking under the guidance of its new government will provide environmental movements across Latin America and the world with a blueprint for success.
The results of Colombia’s presidential election will also be a source of inspiration for progressive social movements across the world. Petro and Marquez clearly showed that determined grassroots organising and coalition building can achieve results even against a huge pushback from the right-wing establishment. Throughout this election season, Petro’s rivals highlighted his past involvement in the M19 rebel group, which demobilised in the 1990s, to turn Colombian people against him. When this didn’t work, they started distorting the promises he made in his manifesto to make him look like an unserious candidate who cannot handle the challenges facing the country. But none of these smear campaigns succeeded thanks to the strong bonds Petro and Marquez built with Indigenous communities, Afro-Colombians, peasants, women, gender-diverse people and many other strategic constituencies over the years.
All in all, Petro and Marquez’ election victory is not only a win for Colombians but all peoples of the region because it marks the beginning of a new “pink tide” in Latin America – the emergence of a new wave of socialism that puts climate justice at its core, and is ready to transform the ways we live and relate to each other to protect our collective future.
The next four years will not be easy for Colombia’s new government, as it will need to work against a bruised but still strong right-wing establishment that is desperate to take back power. But despite all the challenges still on the horizon, with Petro and Marquez in power, “nobodies” in Colombia and across the region can now speed up their efforts to build an inclusive, just and prosperous future for all that is free of threats of violence, hunger and climate devastation.
A formerly sunken boat sits with its stern stuck in the mud along the shoreline of Lake Mead near Boulder City, Nevada. (photo: John Locher/AP)
If the reservoir dips below 895 feet — a possibility still years away — Lake Mead would reach dead pool, carrying enormous consequences for millions of people across Arizona, California, Nevada and parts of Mexico.
Lake Mead's water level on Wednesday was measured at 1,044.03 feet, its lowest elevation since the lake was filled in the 1930s. If the reservoir dips below 895 feet — a possibility still years away — Lake Mead would reach dead pool, carrying enormous consequences for millions of people across Arizona, California, Nevada and parts of Mexico.
"This is deadly serious stuff," said Robert Glennon, an emeritus professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in water law and policy.
Persistent drought conditions over the past two decades, exacerbated by climate change and increased water demands across the southwestern United States, have contributed to Lake Mead's depletion. Though the reservoir is at risk of becoming a dead pool, it would most likely take several more years to reach that level, Glennon said.
In the meantime, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and water managers across the southwestern United States are making efforts to manage the flow of water into the Colorado River and regulate water use among states in the region. These measures are designed to help replenish Lake Mead, which was created on the Colorado River on the Arizona-Nevada border when the Hoover Dam was built in the early 1930s, and another severely depleted reservoir, Lake Powell, which was created along the border of Utah and Arizona.
Dead pool would not mean that there was no water left in the reservoir, but even before Lake Mead were to hit that point, there are concerns that water levels could fall so low that the production of hydroelectric power would be hindered.
"Electricity generation in our western reservoirs becomes a problem as the water level in the reservoirs goes down," Glennon said.
As a reservoir is depleted, there is less water flowing through turbines and less liquid pressure to make them spin, which means the turbines produce less electricity, he added.
Glennon said water levels at Lake Mead have seen unexpectedly significant declines in recent years. At roughly this same time last year, Lake Mead's elevation was measured at around 1,069 feet, according to the Bureau of Reclamation. In 2020, water levels at the end of June were around 1,087 feet.
In late April, Lake Mead's declining water level exposed an intake valve that first began supplying Nevada customers in 1971. The following month, two sets of human remains were discovered as a result of the reservoir's receding shoreline.
Glennon said the situation at Lake Mead is forcing local officials to take "dramatic steps" to replenish the reservoir, particularly as climate change is expected to worsen drought conditions in the West and will continue to affect how much water flows into the Colorado River.
"This is the 23rd year of drought, and we don't know if it's a 23-year drought, a 50-year drought or maybe it's a 100-year drought," he said. "We just don't know what's going to turn this around."
Special Coverage: Ukraine, A Historic Resistance
READ MORE
Follow us on facebook and twitter!
PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.