Anti-Terrorism Laws Increasingly Used to Target Indigenous Activists
BY Sandra Cuffe Truthout
PUBLISHED
October 12, 2018
The images flew around the world. The teepees. The tear gas. The Indigenous water protectors’ camps. The boots advancing in unison as security forces cracked down on protests at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access pipeline. The defiance. The hundreds of arrests.
“While Sioux leaders advocated for protests to remain peaceful, State law enforcement officials, private security companies and the North Dakota National Guard employed a militarized response to protests,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, the UN Special Rapporteur for Indigenous Peoples, wrote in a recent report. A mercenary firm had been surveilling the pipeline opposition movement and engaged in military-style counterterrorism measures, according to an investigative report published by The Intercept.
The use of counterterrorism tactics against Indigenous protesters in the US reflects a global trend. But in many parts of the world, and particularly in Latin America, Indigenous leaders and activists are also openly and explicitly criminalized as terrorists. The use of anti-terrorism and national security legislation and policies against Indigenous activists is becoming more and more common.
Ill-Defined Anti-Terrorism Laws Permit Targeted Criminalization
“Several of the countries that I’ve been to, and from the communications I’ve received, have indicated that the anti-terrorism act or the national security act is the one that’s being used more against Indigenous peoples,” Tauli-Corpuz told Truthout. With laws defining terrorism in a vague manner, governments can consider blockades against logging companies to be terrorist acts, for example, she said.
“It’s easy to put that under the umbrella of terrorism. That’s a big problem that it’s in the hands of governments that have several laws that they can just use to trump up charges against Indigenous peoples and now they have even more possibilities to do that because of the anti-terrorism acts,” said Tauli-Corpuz. “The coming into being of these anti-terrorism laws is exacerbating the situation of impunity and criminalization of Indigenous peoples.”
https://truthout.org/articles/anti-terrorism-laws-increasingly-used-to-target-indigenous-activists/
What happens on the reservations is expanded across the country................
