FoE ACTIVISTS RECEIVE
GOLDMAN PRIZE
On Monday April 17, Oscar Rivas
and Elías Díaz Peña of
Sobrevivencia/Friends of the Earth Paraguay
received the Goldman Prize, the world's
largest award for grassroots
environmentalists. Rivas and Díaz Peña are
among the seven environmental heroes from
around the globe who received the
prestigious prize -- which includes a
$125,000 award -- at a ceremony in San
Francisco.
The FoE Paraguay activists were
nominated for the award due to their long,
valiant and ongoing resistance to two
export-driven economic development projects
along the Paraná and Paraguay rivers in
South America's Río de la Plata Basin.
Rivas and Díaz Peña began working with
communities affected by the Yacyretá Dam in
1991. Over the years, this hydroelectric
project has flooded the homes of 50,000
people, disrupted fish migration (and thus
subsistence diets), and drastically altered
the region’s groundwater system. In 1996,
Sobrevivencia filed a claim with the World
Bank’s independent inspection panel and the
Inter-American Development Bank's
independent inspection mechanism regarding
the Yacyretá Dam. The organization charged
that the project’s severe problems were
caused by violations of the banks’
environmental and resettlement policies.
The claim led to the development of a new
model that can be used to investigate other
development projects with social and
environmental consequences.
As originally designed, the Hidrovía
navigation project would have converted
3,400 kilometers of the Paraguay and Paraná
River systems into an industrial shipping
channel, endangering the world’s largest
wetlands, the Pantanal, and destroying
local economies and communities in
Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and
Uruguay. In the fight against the Hidrovía,
Rivas and Díaz Peña led a coalition of 300
groups of indigenous people, communities
and environmentalists from each of the five
nations to develop a "floating seminar."
The educational campaign traveled 1,200
kilometers in three traditional riverboats
along the Paraguay River to alert local
communities to the implications of the
Hidrovía project. They successfully
persuaded the Hidrovía’s sponsors to
recognize the project’s negative social and
environmental impacts, and proposed
sustainable alternatives that would not
require large-scale interventions on the
rivers.
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Rivas and Díaz Peña founded
Sobrevivencia in 1986, while Paraguay
struggled under the oppressive rule of
General Alfredo Stroessner. Their
campaigning to restore quality of life to
poor, indigenous and marginalized
Paraguayans through environmental
conservation continued throughout the
ensuing political turmoil involving efforts
by fascistic groups to regain control of
the country. Since its creation,
Sobrevivencia has actively advocated for
democracy and lobbied for policies that
would protect the rights of people
suffering from the consequences of
ill-fated development projects. The group
joined Friends of the Earth International
in1992.
"As long as the ‘ancient tribes of the
future’- indigenous peoples and traditional
communities, keepers of the great original
wisdom, owners of the key to continuation
of life on the planet - maintain their
tenacity and resistance, we will all find
hope in our threatened future," says Oscar
Rivas. Elías Díaz Peña adds: "To achieve
sustainability among human societies, we
must revise the present development model
which is based on exploitation of resources
and imposed by centers of power. We must
replace it with new, creative systems that
originate from within local communities,
are based on their real needs and
priorities, and are directed towards
recovery and conservation of life
quality."
Friends of the Earth activists have also
received the prestigious Goldman Prize in
previous years. FoEI Chair Ricardo Navarro
from El Salvador was awarded the prize in
1995. Samuel Nguiffo from Friends of the
Earth's new member group in Cameroon,
Centre for Environment and Development, was
a 1999 recipient. FoE Australia has long
campaigned with two of the 1999 Goldman
Prize winners, Jacqui Katona and Yvonne
Margarula of the Mirrar people, against the
Jabiluka uranium mine in Australia's Kakadu
National Park. 1991 winner Wangari Maathai
from Kenya is a member of Friends of the
Earth International's Council of
Patrons.
Ann Doherty, FoEI Secretariat,
Amsterdam
Chuck Greene, Goldman Environmental
Foundation
Tel: 415 788 9090
Founded in 1971, Friends of
the Earth International (FoEI) is a global
federation of 61 non-governmental
environmental organizations from as many
countries.
