CIVICUS speaks about the role of civil society and its expectations for the upcoming COP28 climate summit with María Reyes, a young human rights and environmental activist from the Mexican state of Puebla.
María is part of the Indigenous Figures (Futuros Indígenas) collective, made up of peoples, including young people, from Mexico and Central America. She participates in the global south division of Fridays for Future (FFF), an organisation that fights for environmental justice and advocates for action in the face of the climate emergency.
What are Mexico’s main environmental problems?
Generally speaking, Mexico is very vulnerable to the climate crisis. Water scarcity is a central issue, partly caused by droughts, but also by infrastructure problems, as many people do not have access to piped drinking water, and by very poor distribution and overexploitation of aquifers by private companies. If we add to the existing drought the fact that in many communities there are companies that obtain concessions through non-legal and non-transparent means and appropriate the little water that is left, the situation for people becomes unbearable.
Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries to be an activist and environmental defender. In the southeast of Mexico there is a series of transnational extractive megaprojects, such as the Interoceanic Corridor and the ‘Mayan Train’, which threaten the environment through logging and water extraction, and displace wildlife, expropriate territories and resources, harm people and commit human rights violations. Local communities, particularly Indigenous communities, are criminalised when they oppose these megaprojects that are imposed on their territories without any consultation and without their consent or through the staging of rigged consultations.
It is also very dangerous to be a journalist in Mexico, because of the risks involved in trying to report on these issues. This is a key issue for the Indigenous Futures network because most of us are communicators as well as land defenders. Colleagues like Miryam Vargas, of El Telar de la Radio Cholollán, and Wendy Juárez, of the podcast Hablemos de Territorio (‘Let’s talk about territories’), report on land rights. They are on the ground when arbitrary arrests take place or when polluting waste is dumped in a river, and they manage to capture images and testimonies to broadcast. These are things that we don’t usually see in the mass media because most of them get government funding.
It is difficult to separate the issues we work on because, for instance, when we work on an environmental issue like water, it also soon becomes a gender issue, as women are the first to be impacted on by water scarcity. The struggle for water then becomes a gender struggle as well a struggle for economic independence and community sovereignty.
What are relations like between Mexican climate activists and the Mexican government?
Environmental activism in Mexico is very polarised. I joined the movement in 2019, when I was finishing my studies, and the risks faced by activism in some parts of Mexico felt like a distant issue to me. Our mobilisations and demands were very youthful: it was about skipping class on a Friday and staging a protest to demand the declaration of a climate emergency.
When your activism is limited to raising awareness of environmental issues, the government doesn’t even register your existence. It doesn’t care. But when you start to make demands about more structural problems that touch on the interests of the Mexican government they start to see you. This happened to us in 2021, when a change to the Electricity Industry Law was proposed that would favour the most polluting forms of energy generation, delaying compliance with our goals under the Paris Agreement. When we began to denounce this and complain about the way in which our human right to a healthy environment would be compromised, we began to perceive the government’s reaction, which blocked our access to some advocacy spaces.
Even so, ours remained a very safe form of activism in the Mexican context. When one really becomes a threat to the government’s interests and not only criticises extractivist companies but also actively defends territories against their activities, things change.
People from Indigenous communities are the most at risk. Many communicators who are part of the Indigenous Futures network and campaign to change narratives at the local level have been criminalised, persecuted and harassed in their homes and workplaces. Such are the cases of Mario Quintero and David Hernández Salazar, from the Assembly of Indigenous Peoples of the Isthmus in Defence of Land and Territory, threatened for defending their territories from wind farms and the Interoceanic Corridor.
So there is a polarised scenario: either your demands are not radical enough and then the government pays no attention to you, or they are too radical and then you are branded a threat to national sovereignty, you are criminalised and can be made to disappear. We got proof of this in November 2022, when a collective of activists hacked into the Ministry of Defence. There had always been suspicions that the army had journalists and human rights defenders under surveillance, and this was confirmed when a list of organisations and collectives considered threats to sovereignty and national security was leaked. This list included Indigenous peoples’ collectives, feminist groups and mothers’ collectives searching for their disappeared children, along with terrorist organisations such as Al Qaeda and ISIS and drug cartels.
It matters little whether we are defending human rights: if we are perceived as a threat to national interests we are labelled on the same level as terrorists and drug traffickers.
What kind of work do you do with Indigenous Futures and FFF?
Much of my climate activism is about building movements and making them visible. Behind the huge global mobilisations there is a lot of logistical, narrative, community, political and even financial work to keep the movement active and facilitate everyone’s work.
Since 2021, Mexican young people have been campaigning against Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the state-owned oil company, sadly known for setting the Gulf of Mexico on fire two years ago. The images of that fire in the middle of the ocean were shocking. Members of FFF’s Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA) group have mobilised to expose Pemex as a climate criminal. It is the ninth most polluting company in the world. It threatens the fulfilment of our country’s climate commitments, contributing towards our ranking as the 14th most polluting country in the world.
Our work to change the narrative about the company has been very hard because of the nationalistic and patriotic halo that surrounds it. We are currently appealing to Pemex’s main foreign funders, which are US banks, to stop supporting it.
Internationally, I am also organising with the Non-Governmental Alliance of Radical Youth, which seeks to influence the climate diplomacy space to advance youth visions against false solutions to the climate crisis, and with the Equitable Fossil Fuel Phase Out (EFFPO) campaign, driven by various groups of the international youth movement. The idea was born in June 2023, at the pre-COP meeting held in Bonn, Germany, when several groups came together to unify our demands towards climate negotiations.
What are EFFPO’s demands for COP28?
The campaign has three demands. The first focuses on fossil fuels, which should have been addressed since COP1. There is still no consensus, no language, no decision on how to combat fossil fuels. It must be recognised that in order to lower carbon emissions and human rights violations by this industry, fossil fuels must be phased out, which the COP28 presidency refuses to do. Instead of eliminating the problem at its root, they want to hold us hostage to carbon credits, geoengineering and other things that have proven counterproductive on a large scale.
After 27 COPs, there is still no language on fossil fuels in official negotiating documents. The issue is not even on the agenda. When you think of the Paris Agreement you immediately link it to fossil fuels, but the truth is that the term is not even mentioned, which is very convenient for certain government delegations because it does not create obligations for them. We have advocated extensively for these terms to be included in the language of official COP28 negotiating documents, particularly in relation to the equitable phase-out of fossil fuels. But frankly, things are not going very well: the term ‘mitigation’ did not even come up on the pre-COP agenda.
Our second demand is to establish a conflict-of-interest policy. Representatives of oil and gas companies are unofficially involved in climate negotiations. They have no title, they do not appear as such on attendees’ lists, but we know they are there because we have seen them take advantage of COPs and pre-COPs to request informal meetings with heads of delegations or with the secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body in charge of organising COPs. This demand focuses on establishing a conflict-of-interest policy and ensuring that states’ participation in COPs is not subject to funding from such groups.
We are calling for the exclusion of oil and gas company representatives from climate negotiating spaces because their lobbying has done nothing but prevent negotiations agreeing the measures needed to tackle the climate crisis. We therefore advocate a mandatory register of the people who enter the space and the interests they represent, to ensure they do not jeopardise the negotiations. This is a very hot issue right now because the president of COP28 is the CEO of an oil company. That says a lot about the gigantic conflict of interest involved.
Finally, we call for the phase-out of fossil fuels to take place through a just energy transition, in which the burdens and benefits of historically excluded communities are prioritised, and for favouring small-scale energy production processes in which means of production are in the hands of local communities.
Over the past year we advocated extensively on the issue of loss and damage, and thanks to these efforts the loss and damage fund is already on the agenda. But now we want to see it operational, and we want to make sure it works well, which means we do not want to see money put into a fund lacking clear distribution mechanisms. We want to make sure the money goes directly to affected communities instead of passing through the hands of corrupt governments. We want a fund for losses and damages to be set up, but not necessarily for that money to be distributed by the Mexican government, which is subjecting us to a militarisation process as we speak.
Why is civil society participation in COPs so important?
Our job as organised youth and as civil society is to say what no one else is saying and demand what no one else is going to demand. If we leave the issue in the hands of governments, nothing is going to change. There have already been 27 COPs and they have not been able to reach an agreement on the issue of fossil fuels.
If we are not there to position certain issues, those issues are not mentioned and go unnoticed. And without enough pressure from communities and young people, COPs end up being nothing more than climate festivals. As it happens, COPs are full of pavilions and alternative events that, although important to generate civil society participation, distract us from the most important thing, which is what goes on in negotiation rooms. That is why getting to COP is not enough: we need to get inside negotiation rooms. We need to make sure that COP doesn’t turn into a farce, and for that just filling up space is not nearly enough.
Do you think COP28 will offer enough space for civil society?
We already have the experience of COP27 in Egypt, where there was no such space. There was no place where we could come together and have conversations about slightly more radical issues or demonstrate in more confrontational ways, because the omnipresent surveillance, to which activists from the region were particularly subjected, made it very risky.
Unfortunately, we believe that this year will be the same, and we will not have the opportunity to demonstrate outside the conference venue. Within the conference venue we were able to last year: we organised sit-ins and protests and we will surely do it again, but still I don’t think that within COP there will be spaces where we will be able to have much-needed conversations, less formal and less institutional spaces to take advantage of the fact that we are all in Dubai for COP. This seems to me even more serious than not being able to protest, because it isolates us from each other and disconnects us.
In any case, this also presents the opportunity to open us up to other forms of activism. Until now we have resorted a lot to the tactic of holding large mobilisations, leaving out our fellow activists in more repressive contexts who are unable to replicate these tactics. So I hope this COP will be an opportunity to strengthen collaborations and networks with activist groups in that part of the world.
What are your expectations for the outcomes of COP28?
This will be my third COP and I have learned to appreciate United Nations’ negotiations not for what they are in themselves but for their collateral or hidden benefits. I no longer go to COP believing we will achieve something through the official agenda: I have no hopes for that. Rather, I see it as a kind of chessboard on which there are various players, resources and narratives, and it is up to us to position ourselves in that space to push our strategies forward. It’s a chaotic space that you can take advantage of if you have a clear vision and strategy.
It’s very sad and exhausting that this is the case, but after two pre-COPs and two COPs I understand that the traditional system of climate negotiations simply doesn’t work at the level it should to combat the impacts of the climate crisis we are experiencing.
For a youth climate movement that wants to grow as a movement and strengthen partnerships, COPs, and especially this one in the United Arab Emirates, is not the best place to be, because civil society participation will be very restricted and our conversations will likely be constantly monitored. It is also an extremely expensive space. With the same money we need to raise to bring a delegation of 20 or 30 people there, we could be organising a large gathering in another part of the world to continue building the movement, having horizontal and honest conversations and strengthening our relationships and alliances.
Civic space in Mexico is rated ‘repressed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor.
Get in touch with Indigenous Futures through its website or its Facebook page, and follow @futuroindigena on Twitter.