Seminar in Guatemala debates Latin America’s energy model

Representatives from eleven Latin-American countries met in Guatemala on May 11^th at the ‘Latin-American Seminar on Energy Model’, debating the actual conjuncture of the energy model, the violations of human and environmental rights and also the people’s resistance to these extractive projects. Representatives from social organizations and movements from Peru, El Salvador, Brazil, Venezuela, Cuba, Argentina, Colombia, Bolivia, Honduras, Panama, Mexico and Guatemala participated at the Seminar, invited by the Latin American movement of people affected by dams, MAR (Movimiento de Afectados por Represas de América Latina). Also, indigenous authorities and social activists from Maya’s communities in resistance from Huehuetenango, Ixcan, Cobán, Petén and San Marcos, presented their experiences within the struggle against hydro-power projects in these territories and the problems lived due to these transnational projects.

For MAR members, the hydro mega-projects serves for the economic interests of a few, the elite. The continental articulation founded on September 2016 encourages the development of a popular energy project that attends the needs of the people and the building of a new society.

The popular energy project comprehends the need of popular control and communitarian administration over water and energy, efficiency opposite to the spilling, with the view that energy is to attend people’s needS and should not be a commodity.

Also, the principle, that energy and water are common goods, principles that comes from the ancestors indigenous philosophy, of the peasants and black communities that defend life, territories, water and energy.

See below, the video, made during the Seminar: