11 July 22
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Two years after the police murder of George Floyd, racialised police brutality is still tragically ordinary in America.
The lawyer representing his family said Walker was shot “approximately 90 times”. Body-cam footage released by the police confirmed the count. An initial autopsy showed that the Black man had 60 gunshot wounds on his body at the time of his death.
Walker fled a “routine” traffic stop, authorities said in response. He would be alive today, and his encounter with the police would be truly “routine” if only he did not run.
Of course, these claims do not hold water – for several reasons.
First, there is no guarantee that Walker would be alive if he did not run. Sure, as a Black man, I also tell my son that he should “comply” if he is ever stopped by the police -even when there is no legitimate justification for the stop (as it was allegedly the case with Walker). But I know that compliance does not always save Black people from police brutality.
Second, despite what the police tried to imply, Walker’s encounter with the police was already pretty “routine” for America – indeed, “routine” traffic stops and other “routine” interactions between Black people and security forces routinely end with murder in this country.
But why are Black people still being brutally killed under a hail of bullets for fleeing “routine” traffic stops some two years after the brutal police murder of George Floyd led to global protests demanding this deadly “routine” to come to an end?
The answer, sadly, is simple. Despite all the protests, this tragic routine is showing no signs of changing because by routinely intimidating, harassing and killing people of colour, the American police are doing what it was originally designed to do: Upholding white supremacy.
Indeed, the American police are a product of American enslavement – it was created to address the need to halt slave rebellions. Not too long ago, so-called “slave patrols” were criminalising, brutalising and killing Black people across this country in the name of maintaining order. Today, American police officers are keeping this legacy alive as they criminalise, brutalise and kill Black and other marginalised people.
Today, America is still being policed with a warrior mentality – law enforcement forces are still acting like occupiers and enslavers rather than guardians of communal wellbeing when they are dealing with communities of colour.
That white supremacy has always been and still very much is at the core of American policing is hardly a secret.
There is a fast-growing body of evidence that “a significant number of US police instructors have ties to a constellation of armed right-wing militias and white supremacist hate groups.”
It is therefore not really surprising that Black Americans are more likely to die at the hands of police than others. According to a study published by medical journal Lancet in 2021, between 1980-2019 the highest rate of deaths from police violence occurred for Black Americans, who were estimated to be 3.5 times more likely to experience fatal police violence than white Americans.
And white supremacy is such a core characteristic of law enforcement in America that police officers rarely face any punishment for hurting Black people or taking Black lives.
Timothy Loehmann, the former Cleveland police officer who killed a 14-year-old Black boy named Tamir Rice in 2014, for example, was recently rehired as an officer in the borough of Tioga, Pennsylvania. Loehmann was previously fired from the Cleveland police force, but not for killing Rice. He was dismissed merely for failing to disclose that he was told to resign or face termination for incompetence from a position he previously held with Independence, Ohio police department.
While police officers kill unarmed Black people with impunity – for reasons ranging from fleeing a traffic stop to holding a toy gun – they often manage to arrest white people without much incident or injury even after they commit mass murder.
Indeed, even after he killed seven people and wounded dozens of others during the Independence Day Parade in Highland Park, Illinois earlier this week police officers did not shoot Robert Crimo III, a white man. Instead, they politely asked the assailant, “Do me a favour, get on your knees, get on your knees lay down flat on your stomach.” Similarly, they arrested without incident Payton Gendron, a white supremacist teenager who shot 10 people to death in Buffalo, New York to “prevent Black people from replacing White people”.
The white supremacy of the American police is of course a reflection of white supremacy that is at the core of American society.
Due to America’s racist history, the perception that Black men are “threatening and dangerous” is ingrained in the collective American unconscious. This is undoubtedly contributing to the police’s tendency to be violent towards Black members of the public. In addition, studies have shown Black children – both girls and boys – are perceived as older and less innocent than their white peers, making them more prone to police violence and punishment.
The media also works to criminalise blackness and Black faces and helps create conditions that perpetuate police violence against Black people.
Black Americans, and Black men, in particular, are overrepresented as perpetrators of crime in US news media. Meanwhile, the same media outlets tend to use images and narratives that make white perpetrators of most violent crimes look innocent or at least incapable of taking responsibility for their actions. This feeds into existing stereotypes that people of African American descent are threatening and overall more dangerous than white people.
“The white press, inflames the white public against Black people. The police are able to use it to paint the Black community as a criminal element. The police are able to use the press to make the white public think that 90 percent or 99 percent of the people in the Black community are criminals,” Malcolm X said in 1962, but his words still sound eerily relevant today. “And once the white public is convinced that most of the Black community is a criminal element, then this automatically paves the way for the police to move into the negro community, exercising Gestapo tactics, stopping any Black man on the sidewalk… As long as he is Black and a member of the Black community, the white public thinks that the white policeman is justified in going in there and trampling on that man’s civil rights and on that man’s human rights,” he added.
The murder of Jayland Walker is further proof that the main function and aim of American policing today, as it has been throughout history, is upholding white supremacy. The unprecedented protests against racialised police brutality that followed the murder of George Floyd did not change this fact because they failed the bring about a complete overhauling of existing structures. Only a complete re-imagining of public safety in America and the building of a law enforcement network that is tasked with protecting all Americans equally can bring an end to the violence routinely faced by all communities of colour and especially Black people in this country.
A pro-choice protester on the steps of City Hall following the overturning of Roe v. Wade on July 6, 2022, in downtown Los Angeles. (photo: Wesley Lapointe/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court’s decision could help Democrats in 17 tight midterm contests.
“If you want to change the circumstances for women and ... girls in this country, please go out and vote,” President Joe Biden emphasized in a speech on Friday. “For God’s sake, there’s an election in November.”
As Democrats stare down the typical backlash the president’s party experiences in the midterms, they hope abortion rights will energize voters in key battleground states and districts and combat this dynamic, helping them keep their majorities in the House and Senate.
Whether it does remains to be seen: There are still several months before the midterm elections, and voters are focused on a number of issues, including the economy. According to multiple polls conducted in June and July, inflation remains a top issue for many voters, though abortion rights is highly ranked as well. Giving Democratic lawmakers hope, too, are other surveys that have found Democrats are more likely to say they’ll vote in the midterms because of abortion rights compared to Republicans.
It’s worth noting that most of these surveys were national, and that abortion rights could have a bigger impact at the regional level, particularly in states where abortion rights are actively being threatened or restricted. When it comes to congressional races, the issue is likely to have the largest effect in swing Senate and House seats where candidates are in extremely tight contests — races in which even small shifts in turnout and enthusiasm could make the difference.
Here are 17 of the House and Senate races where abortion rights could be a major factor.
House of Representatives
On the House side, abortion rights will likely affect races in a number of battleground districts including blue-leaning districts where Democratic incumbents are defending their seats, Republican ones that Biden would have won in 2020, and hotly contested open seats that are considered toss-ups.
There are dozens of races like that, including the nine following contests, which are among the starkest illustrations of the dynamics playing out across the country. (Partisan ratings for each district are from FiveThirtyEight’s redistricting tracker.)
Democrat-held suburban districts
VA-7 (D +2): Abortion rights became a central issue in Rep. Abigail Spanberger’s northern Virginia battleground district shortly after Roe was overturned when audio emerged of her GOP opponent Yesli Vega suggesting that people who are raped may be less likely to get pregnant.
Spanberger denounced these comments and emphasized her support for “a woman’s right to choose and the fundamental right to privacy.” The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), House Democrats’ campaign arm, has also launched advertising in the district that calls out Vega’s remarks, while other regional Democrats have described the statements as disqualifying. Previously, Vega called the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade an “amazing victory.”
Spanberger’s district — which is more favorable to Democrats than it was in 2020 as a result of redistricting — is one of several Virginia swing districts the party flipped in 2018, where Democrats hope a focus on abortion rights will motivate voters. Virginia’s Second District, which is currently represented by Rep. Elaine Luria and which leans more heavily Republican after redistricting, is another.
NV-3 (D +2): Nevada’s Third District is among the top Republican targets this cycle. As part of her campaign, incumbent Rep. Susie Lee has emphasized her support for abortion rights in recent weeks. Polling has shown Lee, and Republican opponent April Becker, in an extremely close race in the Democrat-leaning swing district, which contains several Las Vegas suburbs.
Following the Supreme Court’s announcement of the Dobbs decision, Lee made a $500,000 television and digital ad buy accusing Becker as focused on “making all abortion illegal.” Becker has said she favors a ban on abortion except in the cases of rape, incest, and threats to the mother’s health.
Lee is also campaigning on the message that electing Democrats like her would help block Republicans from attempting to implement a national abortion ban, a policy some GOP leaders have suggested they’d advocate for once in control of Congress.
KS-03 (R +3): Rep. Sharice Davids is defending a seat that’s become more conservative after redistricting, and she’s made her opposition to both the Supreme Court decision and a state-level amendment to curtail abortion rights well-known.
After the Supreme Court decision, Davids was among the lawmakers mobilizing people to knock on doors and vote against the amendment to Kansas’s constitution, which would “affirm there is no Kansas constitutional right to abortion.” The measure is up for a vote on August 2.
Davids’s opponent will also be selected on August 2 and is likely to be businesswoman Amanda Adkins, who identifies as pro-life and a supporter of the constitutional amendment. Davids’s district includes part of Kansas City and its suburbs, and is one of the places where protecting abortion rights could be especially relevant depending on the outcome of the amendment vote.
Vulnerable Republican incumbents in Biden districts
OH-1 (D +3): Rep. Steve Chabot is among the Republican incumbents now facing serious scrutiny for past stances on abortion rights. Chabot, along with many House Republicans, signed an amicus brief calling for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade, and co-sponsored anti-abortion legislation like the Heartbeat Protection Act, which would have enabled law enforcement to arrest doctors who perform abortions.
Chabot’s opponent, Cincinnati City Council member Greg Landsman, highlighted this contrast while backing a recent measure that allows city employees’ health insurance to cover the cost of an abortion.
Because Chabot is running in a district that President Joe Biden would have won, he is viewed as one of the more vulnerable Republican candidates this cycle. Overall, redistricting has made this district — which now includes all of Cincinnati — more blue. Democrats hope those factors, plus the end of Roe, will help them flip OH-01.
CA-27 (D +8): Rep. Mike Garcia also faces a tough reelection fight in California’s 27th District, which leans slightly more Democratic than his old one. Garcia supported the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe and backed legislation like the Life at Conception Act, which bars all abortions.
Garcia is also running in a district that Biden won in 2020 and will be up against Democrat Christy Smith this fall for the third time. Smith has emphasized her support for abortion rights and joined recent protests of the Supreme Court’s decision.
Another southern California Republican, Rep. David Valadao, who also represents a district Biden previously won, is expected to encounter similar dynamics in his race this fall.
MI-03 (D +3): Rep. Peter Meijer, an anti-abortion Republican, is running in a district that is now more of a toss-up following redistricting.
He joined House Republicans in signing the amicus brief supporting the overturn of Roe v. Wade and has voted against the Women’s Health Protection Act on the House floor. Meijer still needs to win his primary against the more conservative John Gibbs in August; Gibbs has called the Supreme Court’s decision on Roe “great news” for women.
Hillary Scholten, the expected Democratic opponent, has said she would back codifying Roe if elected. “This is a choice for women to make in conjunction with their families, their doctor, their own religious preferences and not for unattached politicians to be making in Washington or Lansing,” Scholten told the Detroit News.
Contested open seats
NY-19 (R +1): A special election in New York’s 19th District this August could offer an early look at the impact that abortion rights could have on races across the country. The August 23 special election for Antonio Delgado’s seat, a battleground district that leans slightly Republican, is set to reveal just how energized Democratic voters are.
Ulster County official and Democrat Pat Ryan has already committed to “nationalize this race” and released a television ad on defending abortion rights. Republican candidate Marc Molinaro has said he would support strengthening laws that protect abortion rights when running for the New York governor’s seat in the past; he has balked at backing the Reproductive Health Act, a state bill that would have expanded abortion rights, however.
PA-17 (D +1): Due to Rep. Conor Lamb’s decision not to run for reelection in the district, Democrat and voting rights attorney Chris Deluzio is vying for this seat against Republican and small-business owner Jeremy Shaffer, an anti-abortion Republican. Shaffer has previously supported a federal constitutional amendment that would bar the right to an abortion, though he has not backed other federal legislation.
“The contrast is obvious. He’s an extremist on abortion,” Deluzio said in an interview with Pittsburgh local news affiliate KDKA.
Pennsylvania’s 17th District, which includes suburbs of Pittsburgh, has shifted slightly more blue after redistricting, giving Democrats a narrow edge in the region, one a focus on abortion rights could increase. Deluzio has said he believes that women across the ideological spectrum are “fired up” and ready to vote in defense of abortion rights.
CO-08 (R +3): Colorado’s Eighth District will see a contest between conservative state Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, who has celebrated the Dobbs decision, and Democratic state legislator and physician Yadira Caraveo, who has supported Gov. Jared Polis’s efforts to protect abortion access in the state.
“As a doctor, I am appalled that GOP politicians in Republican-led states are limiting women’s freedom to choose and providers’ ability to provide care,” Caraveo said in a statement. Kirkmeyer, meanwhile, described the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe as an “exciting day.”
The district, which leans slightly Republican, is a purple battleground.
The Senate
Democratic Senate candidates are trying to put abortion rights front and center in the months before the midterms. Republicans, meanwhile, are tiptoeing around the issue and largely refrain from acknowledging the role they could have in further restricting abortion rights if elected, suggesting concern over being hurt politically on the issue: At the moment, a majority of American voters don’t support outlawing abortion entirely. Instead of abortion, Republicans have worked to shift the conversation to issues like the economy and gas prices, where they might have more of an edge over Democrats.
Though abortion rights are on the ballot across the country, the Supreme Court’s decision might tip the scales in close contests and in purple states, potentially helping Democrats reinvigorate campaigns that were struggling against the headwinds of an unpopular president and inflation and mitigate a predicted red wave.
Wisconsin: Incumbent Republican Sen. Ron Johnson has been a vocal opponent of abortion rights, and four Democrats — Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry, state Treasurer Sarah Godlewski, and Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson — are competing for the opportunity to challenge him in the August 9 primaries. Johnson has suggested that people who don’t like the state’s abortion laws can move and has supported a federal abortion ban after 20 weeks of pregnancy. The Democratic candidates all oppose any kind of restrictions on abortion.
Defeating Johnson might improve Democrats’ chances of getting the 50 votes they would need in the Senate to carve out an exception to the filibuster and codify Roe, though they would still need to keep the House to make that happen. Johnson’s opposition to abortion was under Democratic attack even before the Supreme Court’s decision, which has now led to the suspension of abortion services in the state.
Ohio: Though Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan was once anti-abortion, he changed his position in 2015 after listening to the stories of women who sought abortions. Now the Democratic nominee for the centrist state’s open Senate seat is calling state Republicans’ revival of a previously blocked 2019 state law that banned abortions after about six weeks “extremism.”
He’s trying to frame the overturning of Roe in the context of his core campaign promises: “We built a campaign around issues like freedom, economic freedom, good middle class jobs and wages, and making sure we rebuild the middle class. This is an issue of freedom as well,” he told the Washington Post.
His opponent, Trump-endorsed Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, has praised the Supreme Court decision and hailed a “new phase of the pro-life movement” in the US. But he’s not making the decision a focal point of his campaign, redirecting to issues like rising fuel costs.
Nevada: Incumbent Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto has been very explicit about the stakes of the race for reproductive rights, saying that keeping her seat is key to “protecting our rights in this country” and “preventing a federal abortion ban.” For now, abortion is protected in Nevada, a socially liberal state, until 24 weeks of pregnancy under a 1990 referendum that she supported. She has also introduced legislation that would help protect the privacy of people who receive reproductive health care.
Former state Attorney General Adam Laxalt, the Republican Senate nominee, supported the Supreme Court’s decision and said that “Roe v. Wade was always a joke.” But he’s also trying to avoid the subject of abortion, which he told the Associated Press won’t “distract voters from unaffordable prices, rising crime or the border crisis.”
Georgia: Abortion was a central issue in Georgia’s Senate race before the Supreme Court ruled, with Republicans attacking incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock over his support of abortion rights and Democrats firing back against vehemently anti-abortion GOP nominee Herschel Walker. Warnock, a pastor and arguably the most vulnerable Democrat in the Senate, has said that the decision to get an abortion should be made by pregnant people and their doctors.
Walker, on the other hand, has opposed abortion even in cases of rape or incest or where the mother’s life is at risk. “There’s no exception in my mind,” Walker said in June, The Hill reported. “Like I say, I believe in life. I believe in life.”
Pennsylvania: The perennial battleground state of Pennsylvania presents one of Senate Democrats’ best chances at a pickup given that incumbent Republican Sen. Pat Toomey is retiring. Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, the Democratic nominee, has said that he would eliminate the filibuster and codify abortion rights and that he opposes any restrictions on abortion. “This has been settled for 50 years and is just plain common-sense,” he said in a statement after the decision.
Trump-backed candidate Mehmet Oz, the GOP nominee, initially celebrated the leak of the draft decision by saying that he would support legislation that advanced the interests of the anti-abortion movement. But he backtracked after the actual decision, saying in a statement that he respected people “with a different view” and recognized that it was a controversial topic. During the primary, his GOP opponents attacked him for having insufficiently conservative views on abortion and other Republican priorities.
North Carolina: Democrat and former North Carolina Supreme Court Chief Justice Cheri Beasley, who’s running for retiring Republican Sen. Richard Burr’s seat, has been sounding the alarm on abortion rights since the draft version of the Supreme Court’s decision was leaked to Politico in May. She says the Senate should act to codify abortion rights, but has stopped short of embracing proposals to pack the Supreme Court.
Her opponent, Republican Rep. Ted Budd, who has been endorsed by Trump, has been comparatively reluctant to talk about the issue. He praised the Supreme Court decision for returning power to the states but has indicated that he wouldn’t support a nationwide ban on abortion.
North Carolina has become a critical abortion safe haven in the South, with Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper signing an executive order this week aimed at protecting access in the state, even for out-of-state travelers.
New Hampshire: The New Hampshire primaries aren’t until September 13, but the five Republican frontrunners in the Senate race have indicated when pressed at a debate last month that they wouldn’t support a nationwide abortion ban.
Incumbent Democratic Sen. Maggie Hassan, who is facing a tough reelection campaign, has suggested that voters shouldn’t take them at their word: “My opponents have made themselves very, very clear: if elected, they would work to eviscerate a woman’s fundamental rights. In the world’s greatest democracy, they would make women second class citizens,” she told reporters after the Supreme Court decision came down.
Arizona: Incumbent Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly hasn’t talked about abortion rights as much as other Democratic Senate candidates. But he’s made his stance clear, signing on to a letter — along with Bennet, Hassan, and Cortez Masto — that called on Biden to take immediate action in response to the Supreme Court’s decision.
“We call on you to take every step available to your Administration, across federal agencies, to help women access abortions and other reproductive health care, and to protect those who will face the harshest burdens from this devastating and extreme decision,” they wrote.
There are several Republicans in contention to challenge Kelly in the August 2 primary, and they’ve made Kelly’s support of abortion rights a key line of attack. Blake Masters, a venture capitalist, has said that Kelly “wants to force your state to allow it.” And Mark Brnovich, the state’s attorney general, supported sending Roe to the “ash heap of history where it belongs.”
Mark MacGann. (photo: David Levene/WP)
MacGann, the public face of the company’s tumultuous European expansion, said he leaked the trove of documents to make up for his role in its aggressive practices: “We had actually sold people a lie.”
A longtime European lobbyist, MacGann interacted with top global business and government leaders during his tenure with the company between 2014 and 2016 but also came face-to-face with the violent protests over Uber’s disruptive practices.
He said he left the company having concluded that Uber’s culture left him powerless to question or change its ways, and fearing that the rancorous backlash against the company put his family’s safety at risk.
MacGann leaked more than 124,000 company documents to the Guardian, which shared the materials with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which helped lead the project, and dozens of other news organizations, including The Washington Post. The Uber Files, which date to between 2013 and 2017, reveal the ride-hailing company’s aggressive entrance into cities around the world — while frequently challenging the reach of existing laws and regulations.
MacGann, 52, came forward in a video interview with the Guardian published Monday. As the chief lobbyist charged with pushing Uber’s European expansion, MacGann said he bears some responsibility for company actions he now condemns — including the way it wooed governments and the public with rosy visions of upward mobility and economic freedom for low-income drivers.
Pulling back the curtain on the company’s operations during those years — even exposing communications that show his role in some of Uber’s more controversial practices — is his attempt to make amends, he said.
“I was the one talking to governments, I was the one pushing this with the media, I was the one telling people that they should change the rules because drivers were going to benefit and people were going to get so much economic opportunity,” he said. “When that turned out not to be the case — we had actually sold people a lie — how can you have a clear conscience if you don’t stand up and own your contribution to how people are being treated today?”
But MacGann ultimately faulted the company for what he said was its willingness “to break all the rules and use its money and its power, to impact, to destroy.”
Uber spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker said “mistakes” made earlier in Uber’s history led five years ago to “one of the most infamous reckonings in the history of corporate America,” which involved lawsuits, investigations and several departures from the ranks of executive leadership.
“We have not and will not make excuses for past behavior that is clearly not in line with our present values,” she said. “Instead, we ask the public to judge us by what we’ve done over the last five years and what we will do in the years to come.”
Regarding MacGann, though, Uber spokesman Noah Edwardsen said in a statement Monday “he is in no position to speak credibly about Uber today.” He said that "Mark had only praise for Uber when he left the company six years ago,” citing a departure email in which he called himself “a strong believer in Uber’s mission.”
MacGann and Uber recently settled a legal dispute out of court that the Guardian reported related to compensation, and that terms prohibited MacGann from discussing the matter.
But Uber’s spokesman said that MacGann received 550,000 euros. “It is noteworthy that Mark felt compelled to ‘blow the whistle’ only after his check cleared,” Edwardsen said.
When MacGann was asked whether he leaked the documents out of vengeance against his former employer, he acknowledged that “certainly, I have had my grievances with Uber in the past.” But, he added, “people need to look at the facts that I’m helping to expose.”
MacGann is the latest whistleblower who has gone public about a decision to leak confidential documents that have illuminated how some of the world’s most powerful and consequential players operate, including tech giants and governmental agencies.
In 2013, former government contractor Edward Snowden revealed himself as the confidential source who provided documents to the Guardian and The Post, which exposed the National Security Agency’s vast global surveillance programs. In 2018, former Cambridge Analytica research director Christopher Wylie shared materials with journalists that showed how the data firm improperly harvested data from millions of Facebook users to target voters on behalf of the Donald Trump campaign. And in 2021, former Facebook product manager Frances Haugen shared confidential company documents with the Wall Street Journal, and later the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, that showed the company failing to thwart the spread of false and incendiary content. The Facebook Papers, like the Uber Files, were reviewed by a consortium of news organizations, including The Post.
Whistleblowing can lead to major investigations, prosecutions and new laws. Although their motivations may be complex, corporate or government leakers often express a belief that public disclosure of confidential activities is the only way to guarantee the change they hope to see.
MacGann is an Irishman who speaks fluent French and spent more than two decades as a tech, telecommunications and financial services lobbyist throughout Europe before joining Uber. He began working for the company as a consultant in summer 2014.
Months later, he was brought onto the staff as a chief lobbyist with a tall order: courting governments in more than 40 countries across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. It was a role that placed him at the nexus of power at a whirlwind moment for the company. A business world still in thrall to the rise of tech companies like Google and Facebook perceived Uber as a next big thing; investors vied to get in on the ground floor, and top talent signed on for executive roles with the hope of stock options that could turn into mini-fortunes.
Uber was “the hottest ticket in town, and to a certain extent, both on the investor side and also on the political side, people were almost falling over themselves in order to meet with Uber and to hear what we had to offer,” said MacGann, who suddenly found he had personal access to world leaders and their advisers. It was an “intoxicating” experience, he said.
But the company was facing resistance in several countries, primarily from taxi drivers who couldn’t compete with the low fares offered by Uber, whose drivers in new cities were heavily subsidized, at first, with millions of dollars in investor capital. Protests erupted in Berlin, London and Paris. Local courts in Germany had restricted some of Uber’s services. MacGann was put in charge of a team tasked with lobbying governments to allow Uber to make inroads, sometimes in the face of legal or regulatory hurdles.
In media interviews and speaking engagements throughout his tenure, MacGann declared that Uber was not “anti-regulation” but simply a “tech company” using data to match supply with demand — and that’s why, he argued, it shouldn’t have to abide by the old regulatory models for the taxi industry.
Now, MacGann summarizes Uber’s strategy as one of simply barging into new markets and expanding as best it could, despite awareness that it may well be violating local laws.
“The mantra that people repeated from one office to another was the mantra from the top,” MacGann said. “Don’t ask for permission. Just launch, hustle, enlist drivers, go out, do the marketing, and quickly people will wake up and see what a great thing Uber is.”
Devon Spurgeon, a spokeswoman for Uber founder and then-chief executive Travis Kalanick, said in a statement that Uber’s “expansion activities were led by over a hundred leaders in dozens of countries around the world and at all times under the direct oversight and with the full approval of Uber’s robust legal policy, and compliance groups.” Kalanick helped pioneer a business model that “required a change of the status quo, as Uber became a serious competitor in an industry where competition had been historically outlawed,” she added.
In a statement sent to The Post after MacGann had unmasked himself Monday, Spurgeon said “we have no comment at this point.”
The Uber Files also implicate MacGann, though, along with his former colleagues, in some of Uber’s more hard-charging business practices. They show him personally appealing to Emmanuel Macron, then the economy minister for France, after a local official in the city of Marseille banned an Uber service in 2015, and participating in an aggressive lobbying and influence campaign to try to solidify a foothold in Russia.
And MacGann played a role in the conversations around protests against Uber that had erupted in some European cities — sometimes involving physical attacks against Uber drivers — according to the internal communications the lobbyist leaked.
In a text message exchange from January 2016, Kalanick urged his top lieutenants to organize a counterprotest in Paris, and appeared to downplay concerns “about taxi violence” against Uber drivers. “I think it’s worth it,” Kalanick wrote. “Violence guarantee success.”
Spurgeon said the former executive “never suggested that Uber should take advantage of violence at the expense of driver safety. Any accusation that Mr. Kalanick directed, engaged in, or was involved in any of these activities is completely false.” Hazelbaker, the Uber spokeswoman, acknowledged past mistakes in how drivers were treated, especially in the years that Kalanick ran the company, but said that no one, including Kalanick, wanted to see violence against Uber drivers.
In his interview with the Guardian, MacGann said he thinks Kalanick “meant that the only way to get governments to change the rules, and legalize Uber and allow Uber to grow, as Uber wished, would be to keep the fight, to keep the controversy burning. And if that meant Uber drivers going on strike, Uber drivers doing a demo in the streets, Uber drivers blocking Barcelona, blocking Berlin, blocking Paris, then that was the way to go.”
MacGann added: “Of course it’s dangerous. It’s also, in a way, very selfish. Because he was not the guy on the street who is being threatened, who is being attacked, who is being beaten up and, in some cases, shot.”
MacGann had been part of that text exchange, as one of the voices raising concerns about safety. But emails from several months earlier show MacGann praising a 2015 corporate strategy to encourage media coverage of violence against Uber drivers in the Netherlands.
“There is no excuse for how the company played with people’s lives,” MacGann said in a statement. “I am disgusted and ashamed that I was a party to the trivialisation of such violence.”
Angry taxi drivers who felt their livelihoods were threatened by Uber saw MacGann as the face of Uber and, at times, aimed their ire at him. He said he received death threats on Twitter and harassment at airports and train stations, and that taxi drivers followed him, recorded where he lived and posted photos online of him with his children. “They needed someone to shout at. They needed somebody to intimidate, somebody to threaten,” MacGann said. “I became that person.”
In one incident, he said, a group of taxi protesters in Rome blocked a car carrying him and a colleague away from a meeting with an adviser to the Italian prime minister. The harassment persisted even after he cut ties with Uber; in 2017, police were called after he said taxi drivers surrounded his Uber ride outside a train station in Brussels.
MacGann said he does not blame those who lashed out at him and shares their frustration with Uber’s business practices. He was dismayed that the company’s only reaction to the threats against him was to assign him bodyguards. “There was no change in behavior,” MacGann said. “No change in tactics. No change in tone. It was, keep the fight, keep the fire burning.”
MacGann said he didn’t see how to promote fundamental change from the inside. In November 2015, he announced his resignation, around the same time several other top executives also left.
“This was not a culture where you could actually stand up and question the company’s decisions or the company’s strategy,” he said. “I realized that I was having no impact, that I was wasting my time with the company, and that feeling, at that point in my career, combined with the fact that I was worried not just for my own safety, but the safety of my family and my friends.”
MacGann later received a post-traumatic stress disorder diagnosis, which a March 2019 medical report said was linked in part to the stress he experienced during his time at Uber.
MacGann did not share those concerns publicly at the time. He told the Financial Times that his 18 months thus far at Uber was “like five years anywhere else … it’s all consuming, but it feels like a privilege.” He told the Wall Street Journal that he was confident the company had “turned a corner” in Europe and that “it’s hard to leave what is unquestionably the most exciting enterprise of our generation.”
Rachel Whetstone, then Uber’s communications and public policy chief, called MacGann “a wonderful leader” who helped the company recognize “the need for modern regulations that promote safety while also increasing choice.” David Plouffe, then Uber’s head of global policy, called him “a terrific advocate for Uber on three continents.” Both have since left the company.
MacGann stayed at Uber as a consultant until August 2016. In November of that year he joined Russian-owned telecommunications firm VimpelCom, which several month earlier had reached a $835 million settlement on U.S. and Dutch bribery charges. Later, he started his own company.
But his time with Uber remained with him long after his stint ended.
“I own what I did, but if it turns out that what I was trying to persuade governments, ministers, prime ministers, presidents and drivers, turned out to be horribly, horribly wrong and untrue, then it’s incumbent upon me to go back and say, ‘I think we made a mistake,’ ” MacGann told the Guardian. “To the extent that people want me to help, I want to play a role in trying to correct that mistake.”
Rescue workers sift through rubble on Sunday after a Russian rocket attack destroyed an apartment building in Chasiv Yar, Ukraine. At least 15 people were killed, and officials are searching for survivors. (photo: Nariman El-Mofty/AP)
The strike late Saturday destroyed three buildings in a residential quarter of the town of Chasiv Yar, inhabited mostly by people who work in nearby factories.
On Sunday evening, rescuers were able to remove enough of the bricks and concrete to retrieve a man who had been trapped for almost 24 hours. Rescuers laid him on a stretcher and he was quickly taken to a hospital.
Ukraine's Emergency Services said the latest rescue brought to six the number of people dug out of the rubble. Earlier in the day, they made contact with three others still trapped alive beneath the ruins.
Pavlo Kyrylenko, governor of the Donetsk region that includes Chasiv Yar, said an estimated 24 people were believed still trapped, including a 9-year-old child.
Cranes and excavators worked alongside rescue teams to clear away the ruins of one building, its walls completely shorn off by the impact of the strike. The thud of artillery on the nearby front line resonated just a few miles away, making some workers flinch and others run for cover.
Valerii, who gave only his first name, was desperately waiting to hear news of his sister and 9-year-old nephew, who lived in the collapsed building and had not answered his calls since Saturday night.
"Now I'm waiting for a miracle" he said, as he stood before the ruins and started to pray, hands clasped together tightly.
"We do not have good expectations, but I am avoiding such thoughts," he said.
Kyrylenko said the town of about 12,000 was hit by Uragan rockets that are fired from truck-borne systems. Chasiv Yar is 20 kilometers (12 miles) southeast of Kramatorsk, a city that is a major target of Russian forces as they grind westward.
However, later Sunday, Viacheslav Boitsov, deputy chief of emergency service in the Donetsk Region, told the Associated Press that four shells hit the neighborhood and they were likely Iskander missiles.
Residents said they heard at least three explosions and that many people were badly wounded in the blasts. A group of neighbors sat Sunday in a courtyard quietly discussing who was wounded and who was still missing.
"There was an explosion, all the windows blew out and I was thrown to the ground," said 45-year-old Oksana, who gave only her first name. She was in her third-floor apartment when the missiles struck.
"My kitchen walls and balcony have completely vanished," she added, struggling to hold back tears. "I called my children to tell them I was alive."
At least one resident plans to stay in the neighborhood
Irina Shulimova, a 59-year-old retiree, recalled the terror. "We didn't hear any incoming sound, we just felt the impact. I ran to hide in the corridor with my dogs. Everyone I knew started calling me to find out what had happened. I was shaking like a leaf," she said.
Front doors and balconies were torn apart in the blast, and heaps of twisted metal and bricks lay on the ground. Crushed summer cherries were smeared on shattered window panes.
A 30-year-old technology worker named Oleksandr said his mother was among those injured in the explosion.
"Thank God I wasn't injured, it was a miracle," he said, touching the crucifix around his neck.
Although the home he shares with his mother is now shattered, he said he doesn't plan to leave the neighborhood.
"I only have enough money to support myself for another month. Lots of people are fed up already of refugees coming from the east — no one will feed or support us there. It's better to stay," said Oleksandr, who declined to give his surname.
Another resident who gave only his first name, Dima, had lived for more than 20 years on the ground floor of one of the buildings that was hollowed out in the attack. He walked back and forth across the rubble.
"As you can see, my home is lost," he said.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy accused the Russians of intentionally targeting civilians.
"Anyone who orders such strikes, everyone who carries them out in ordinary cities, in residential areas, kills absolutely consciously," he said in an address to Ukrainians on Sunday night. "After such hits, they won't be able to say that they didn't know or didn't understand something."
Saturday's attack was just the latest in a series of strikes against civilian areas in the east, even as Russia repeatedly claims it is only hitting targets of military value.
This isn't the first strike to hit civilian buildings
Twenty-one people were killed earlier this month when an apartment building and recreation area came under rocket fire in the southern Odesa region. Another at least 19 people died when a Russian missile hit a shopping mall in the city of Kremenchuk in late June.
There was no comment about the Chasiv Yar attack at a Russian Defense Ministry briefing on Sunday.
The Donetsk region is one of two provinces along with Luhansk that make up the Donbas region, where separatist rebels have fought Ukrainian forces since 2014. Last week, Russia captured the city of Lysychansk, the last major stronghold of Ukrainian resistance in Luhansk.
Russian forces are raising "true hell" in the Donbas, despite assessments they were taking an operational pause, Luhansk governor Serhiy Haidai said Saturday.
After the seizure of Lysychansk, some analysts predicted that Moscow's troops likely would take some time to rearm and regroup.
But "so far there has been no operational pause announced by the enemy. He is still attacking and shelling our lands with the same intensity as before," Haidai said.
He later said Ukrainian forces had destroyed some ammunition depots and barracks used by the Russians.
Immigrant rights protesters march through the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota on June 30, 2018. (photo: Fibonacci Blue/Wikimedia Commons)
Post-Trump, immigrant justice is far out of the spotlight. But many immigrant rights activists, like those organizing to shutter a dismal ICE facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, haven't given up, despite a tough slog of fighting the Trump-like policies of Joe Biden.
As such, it provides a valuable window into the movement to abolish ICE in the Biden era. New Jersey drew national attention when three of its four ICE jails closed in 2021, the result of a years-long grassroots struggle.
But at a time when the Biden administration’s immigration policies barely differ from many of Trump’s, the media attention and the mass rallies of the Trump years have faded from sight, and the very coiner of the phrase “Abolish ICE” has abandoned it to promote faux-progressive politicians, the uphill struggle to actually abolish ICE and the prison-industrial complex that spawned it continues outside the spotlight.
A History of Brutality
EDC’s origins are sordid even by the standards of the private prison boom of the 1980s and ’90s. James Slattery and Morris Horn perfected the art of profiting from human misery while running “one of the most notorious welfare hotels in New York City.” Expanding their skill set into carceral entrepreneurship, they founded Esmor Correctional Services Corporation, and after running some crassly exploitative halfway houses, they won a government contract for immigrant detention.
From the start, EDC earned a reputation for cruelty, which resulted in the 1995 uprising by its three hundred detainees. Women prisoners complained about sexual abuse and guards spying on them in showers, while men told of being chained to toilets, degraded with ethnic slurs, and physically abused. When they set up a barricade inside the facility, police eventually lobbed a flash grenade at it and charged, injuring twenty. Protesters’ demands included “we need our freedom” and “we should not be used as an avenue to acquire wealth.”
In the flurry of negative press following the riot, the government simply shifted its contract from Esmor (which was eventually absorbed into GEO Group) to the Corrections Corporation of America, which rebranded itself as CoreCivic in 2016. A lawsuit led by Somali refugee Hawa Jama dragged on for a full decade, though she eventually won $100,000 in a groundbreaking case. Inhumane treatment, however, continued unabated.
In 1999, Palestinian Salah Dafali was beaten so badly that he required hospitalization; the FBI investigated, to little avail. Boubacar Bah, a tailor from Guinea, was shackled and placed in solitary confinement for thirteen hours after falling and injuring his head in 2007; he died comatose from brain hemorrhaging. Victor Ramirez-Reyes, a fifty-six-year-old Ecuadorian, died of preventable heart disease after medical neglect in 2011. The stories of abuse continued piling up.
Abolishing ICE in New Jersey
The story of grassroots immigrant justice and anti-ICE activism in New Jersey deserves a book of its own, but the critical distinction that sets it apart from similar work elsewhere is that the overwhelming majority of immigrant detention nationally is conducted in privately run facilities, while in New Jersey it took place largely in county jails. EDC was the exception; by the 2010s, the Essex, Hudson, and Bergen county jails were the sites for most ICE detention in the state.
Opposition to these lucrative arrangements ran through the Bush and Obama eras but exploded under Trump, driven by the hypocrisy of officials from deep-blue districts speaking the language of “resistance” while funding their counties through the boon that Trump’s racism provided. For years, activists from a variety of groups flooded county government meetings and engaged in civil disobedience and direct action, sometimes meeting violent police repression. When COVID-19 arrived, detainees put their bodies on the line with hunger strikes, and the Abolish ICE-New York/New Jersey coalition helped transmit their harrowing testimony to the outside.
It often felt hopeless. New Jersey’s county machines are insulated from democratic accountability, and at a November 2020 Hudson County commissioners meeting, every single one of over one hundred speakers called against continuing their ICE contract. The commissioners renewed it anyway, for up to ten years. When protesters congregated on the sidewalk outside county executive Tom DeGise’s house in Jersey City, he convinced a judge to issue a restraining order and had several people arrested (the order wasn’t overturned until summer 2022).
But then a major victory against ICE in New Jersey came in August 2021, when New Jersey banned new or extended contracts with ICE. One by one, the county jails “depopulated” themselves of ICE detainees — a major victory, even if Biden and ICE ignored calls for releases rather than transfers, sending many detainees to upstate New York.
This left only EDC. In 2018, a Democratic congressional contingent showed up on Father’s Day to bang on doors and denounce Trump, but most movement participants recognized it as a performative stunt to draw attention to the only ICE jail not run by their fellow Democrats. (New Jersey congressional reps have had very little to say about EDC since it stopped serving as a Trump symbol and became Biden-run.) The next year, the Jewish-led Never Again Action launched its national campaign at EDC, in collaboration with immigrant-led Movimiento Cosecha. Thirty-six protesters were arrested.
In May 2020, sharp-eyed anti-carceral activists spotted another angle: in a case egregious even by ICE’s lawless standards, the agency disregarded a federal judge to deport Hector Garcia Mendoza to Mexico after the EDC detainee had the courage to sign his name to a class-action lawsuit calling for the release of everyone held there when the safety precautions in the early days of the pandemic proved inadequate. (Mendoza promptly went missing, and many presumed him dead. He briefly reappeared months later before losing contact again and is most likely trapped somewhere doing forced labor.) When activists protested outside EDC — some of the first in-person actions of the pandemic — one of the owners of the building appeared with police, trying unsuccessfully to break up the action.
Suddenly, a new target appeared: Elberon Development Group, which has long leased the building itself to CoreCivic.
Its owner and chairman Anne Evans Estabrook and her son Dave Gibbons (president and CEO) are deeply connected to the New Jersey arts and culture world, so after careful power-mapping, a campaign to embarrass and pressure them developed: protesting outside their corporate office, a major rally during the New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s annual gala in Newark (Estabrook sits on the board), student and alum-led protest at Kean University, where both sit in honorary positions.
The pressure worked — to an extent. In May 2021, Elberon filed suit to break its lease, accusing CoreCivic of failing to maintain conditions of COVID-19 safety. Unfortunately, Governor Phil Murphy waited nearly two months to sign the bill ending ICE detention into law, during which time ICE renewed its contract with CoreCivic to run EDC through August 2023.
CoreCivic is fighting to continue the lease. At a shareholders meeting, its president assured investors it had a unilateral right to extend the lease through 2027. Kathy O’Leary, a leader of the Catholic radical peace organization Pax Christi who has watched the case closely, is not optimistic about its outcome, since it hinges on ICE detention standards and CDC guidelines that are unlikely to prove legally compelling.
The State of the Movement
Still, EDC will presumably close when CoreCivic’s ICE contract expires. Many in the immigrant justice community have faith in New Jersey’s law, but some express doubts. O’Leary notes that in the current lawsuit with its landlord, CoreCivic might be setting itself up for legal arguments for its right to remain. In California, the fellow prison profiteer GEO Group has had some success in challenging the state’s private prison ban for immigrant detention facilities (that case is ongoing). While ICE confirmed the imminent termination of the contract, CoreCivic’s spokesman declined to confirm their own expectation of closure.
Nobody expects New Jersey Democrats to spend political capital on EDC. Those who were so outraged during the Trump years have stopped talking about immigration. The liberals who joined with ICE abolitionists against Trump have shifted focus to the January 6th hearings and the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade reversal, and Biden is all but silent.
New Jersey’s immigrant demographics include robust African and Afro-Caribbean communities Serges Demefack, an organizer with the American Friends Service Committee, says they are aware of the administration’s persistent racism in immigration policy. Deportations and border violence directed at Haitians mark this, but so too does Biden’s disregard for the ongoing violence in Demefack’s native Cameroon.
So what does “abolish ICE” mean in the Biden era? Direct action continues, from vigils outside EDC to canvassing in Elizabeth by North Jersey Democratic Socialists of America. Demefack and O’Leary both agree that ICE detention is just one node in a larger nexus of carceral cashflow that plagues New Jersey (committed to incarceration as a revenue stream, the county jails now import inmates from elsewhere in the state) and calls for even broader prison abolitionist horizons. At the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice, executive director Amy Torres points to the state Values Act, which would severely restrict law enforcement cooperation with ICE. Torres argues that the Values Act aligns with radical goals: “It’s not enough to close jails, we need to starve these sites of people and break the pipelines” that feed them.
For now, the struggle continues. If EDC actually closes next year, it will put New Jersey at the forefront of immigrant justice. If CoreCivic wiggles its way around the state law, anti-carceral activists are ready for what could be a decisive Biden-era immigration justice showdown.
A general view of the temporary United States embassy in Jerusalem taken on 14 May 2018. (photo: AFP)
Site of new US diplomatic compound was owned by Palestinian families and rented to British Mandate authorities, detailed archives reveal
In February 2021, the US State Department and the Israel Land Authority jointly submitted plans for a US diplomatic compound in the Allenby Complex near Hebron Road in southern Jerusalem.
It followed from the highly controversial decision by former US President Donald Trump to unilaterally recognise Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and move the American embassy from Tel Aviv in May 2018.
The compound is currently situated in a temporary site in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighbourhood.
Archives published on Sunday by US-based advocacy group Adalah reveal that the site of the new permanent complex was owned by Palestinians before 1948.
Detailed historical contract agreements show that the Habib, Qleibo, Khalidi, Razzaq and Khalili families were among the original landlords.
The families temporarily leased their properties to British Mandate authorities, who established the Allenby Barracks military base on the site.
The documents show that Mandate authorities paid the Palestinian owners 30 pounds per dunam each year for the land.
US 'infringing property rights'
Following the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948 - which left an estimated 15,000 Palestinians dead and some 750,000 displaced - the owners of the Allenby complex became refugees and their land was confiscated by Israeli authorities using the 1950 Israeli Absentees’ Property Law.
The law has been cited by rights groups, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, as a major tool utilised by Israeli authorities to subjugate Palestinians and enforce an apartheid system.
Among the descendents of the original owners are Palestinians living in East Jerusalem and US citizens, including renowned Palestinian-American historian and professor, Rashid Khalidi.
“The fact that the US government is now participating actively with the Israeli government in this project means that it is actively infringing on the property rights of the legitimate owners of these properties, including many US citizens,” Khalidi said.
Ahead of US President Joe Biden’s visit to Israel later this month, families of the landowners have demanded that the plans for the complex be immediately cancelled.
Adalah called on Israel authorities to release the land to its Palestinian owners, and is consulting descendents of the owners to determine the possibility of legal action.
Israel’s new prime minister Yair Lapid will also move into a Palestinian house in Jerusalem which was seized using the absentees' law following the Nakba, it was revealed earlier this month.
Two previous Israeli prime ministers, David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol, refused to live in Palestinian properties seized under the law, making Lapid's decision unusual in Israeli politics.
Seedlings being planted in a nursery of the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact. (photo: Mongabay/WWF)
Today, Siqueira is the national coordinator of the Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact and restoration manager at Conservation International Brazil (CI-Brasil). She says she wants to restore what her father helped to leave underwater.
The Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact has a goal of reforesting 15 million hectares (37 million acres) of rainforest on Brazil’s coast by 2050. The figure is the result of an analysis of areas with potential for forest restoration published in 2011. It identified priority zones in the Atlantic Forest — a biome that’s even more threatened than the Amazon Rainforest — including permanent preservation areas (APP), legal reserves, areas close to conservation units, regions with endemic or threatened species, and land not suitable for farming.
A 2019 study, co-authored by Siqueira, used satellite images to show that, between 2011 and 2015, around 740,000 hectares (1.8 million acres) of Atlantic Forest were restored in Brazil. By 2020, the Pact aimed for, and achieved, 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of restored forest, meeting the target set under the Bonn Challenge launched in 2011 by the German government and the IUCN, the global conservation authority. By 2025, the halfway point of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the Pact plans to double the figure for Atlantic Forest restoration to 2 million hectares (5 million acres).
“We know there is still a long way to go to reach 15 million hectares, but we believe that this will be an exponential curve,” Siqueira says. “Our projection is based on the idea that the more reforested an environment is, the easier natural regeneration will be. In other words, the larger the forest matrix, the higher its regeneration potential.”
Reducing costs
The Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact was created in 2009 and today counts 300 members, ranging from NGOs, research institutes, entrepreneurs, government agencies, to landowners. The movement supports forest restoration in the 17 Brazilian states where remnants of the Atlantic Forest still stand. It conceives ideas for restoration, identifies strategic areas, and helps monitor the environmental, social and economic aspects of restoration.
Focusing on areas with high capacity for natural regeneration, in order to reduce restoration costs, is one of the Pact’s bets. That path had already been pointed out as effective for tropical forests in a December 2021 study whose authors included Pedro Brancalion, the movement’s deputy coordinator.
“The Pact has been focusing strongly on these areas with high potential for natural regeneration because labor costs, seeds and imported inputs are bottlenecks in restoration,” Siqueira says. “So, when we manage to identify these areas, they usually become priorities for action and cost reduction.”
Given that 70% of Brazil’s population and most of its economic activity is concentrated along its coast, the Atlantic Forest has historically been the most devastated biome in the country. According to NGO SOS Mata Atlântica, only 12.4% of the original forest remains.
“On the one hand, natural regeneration is harder because of the level of degradation,” Siqueira says. “On the other hand, the restoration chain in the Atlantic Forest is more developed because that’s where restoration started in Brazil. Historically, [Rio de Janeiro’s] Tijuca Forest was the first place where restoration took place.”
According to the Pact, natural regeneration is a good strategy for conservation units and smaller rural properties. For larger farms, active tree planting focused on increasing the vegetation cover quickly may be the better option to boost jobs in restoration.
The movement also has an online monitoring system, developed with mapping cooperative MapBiomas, to view forest remnants and areas under recovery.
Healing the river
To advance its restoration goals, some members of the Pact carry out local reforestation projects. This is the case for the Copaíba Environmental Association, named after a tree, Copaifera langsdorffii, whose oil has anti-inflammatory, antiseptic and healing properties.
“We named the institution that would carry out this work of restoring the river after a tree from the local riparian forest,” says Flávia Balderi, co-founder and executive secretary of the Copaíba Environmental Association. “We founded the Copaíba Association to start planting on the banks of the Peixe River in order to change the environmental situation in Socorro municipality [in São Paulo state]. Then our dream grew and expanded to the Camanducaia Basin.”
The Copaíba Environmental Association was established in September 1999 by four teenagers who were vexed by the muddy color of the Peixe River. Today, the association is both a member of the Pact and part of the Mantiqueira Conservation Project, and operates in 19 municipalities to restore the riparian forest and Atlantic rainforest of the Camanducaia River Basin and the Peixe River Basin. The work covers 281,000 hectares (694,000 acres) between the states of São Paulo and Minas Gerais.
Working with 300 landowners, the Copaíba Environmental Association has planted around 700,000 seedlings on 600 hectares (1,500 acres) of land that’s in the process of being restored. “Our nursery has already produced more than 3 million seedlings, not only for our projects. We also sell them, which helps to maintain the institution’s work,” Balderi says.
The 130 tree species grown in the nursery for restoration include copaíba itself. The tree attracts bees, thus contributing to local beekeeping projects in a region that has historically been subjected to economic cycles based on agriculture and livestock, and has only 17% of its native vegetation left.
Women in restoration
From nursery management to executive secretary, most of Copaíba’s members are women. “The fact that my sister Ana and I are founders of the cooperative and are at the forefront of institutional work has enabled other women to join the work and take the lead,” Balderi says. “The Copaíba association is different because women don’t work only in production; they also lead the work of restoration, nursery, communication and finance.”
Women’s participation has grown in rural land management in general. “We can see the increase in the number of female landowners who are making the decision for their properties, who want to carry out the restoration,” Balderi says.
Siqueira, who authored a 2021 study that calls for gender equity to be one of the aspects monitored in restoration projects, says that “men are focused on the productivity of their properties while women are interested in the perpetuity of environmental conditions, in having a property that is healthy, in building quantity and quality of water as well as food security.”
She adds that “inclusion and diversity are crucial. Heterogeneity is part of nature’s process, and all institutions should benefit from it. It’s also important that restoration follows these natural models.”
At the Copaíba Environmental Association, the desire to heal the riparian forests persists. “The work of recovering the 600 hectares of forest we have completed so far is very small compared to the magnitude of the degradation we find in the whole Atlantic Forest and in this area as well,” Balderi says. “We still dream of changing the color of the Peixe River.”
Citations:
Crouzeilles, R., Santiami, E., Rosa, M., Siqueira, L. P., Brancalion, P. H., Rodrigues, R. R., … Pinto, S. (2019). There is hope for achieving ambitious Atlantic Forest restoration commitments. Perspectives in Ecology and Conservation, 17(2), 80-83. doi:10.1016/j.pecon.2019.04.003
Poorter, L., Craven, D., Jakovac, C. C., van der Sande, M. T., Amissah, L., Bongers, F., … Hérault, B. (2021). Multidimensional tropical forest recovery. Science, 374(6573), 1370-1376. doi:10.1126/science.abh3629
Siqueira, L. P., Tedesco, A. M., Meli, P., Diederichsen, A., … Brancalion, P. H. (2021). Gender inclusion in ecological restoration. Restoration Ecology, 29(7), e13497. doi:10.1111/rec.13497
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