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Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
Wed Dec 30, 2020, 11:24 PM Dec 2020

Industrial agriculture threatens a wetland oasis in Bolivia

by Gustavo Jiménez Gonzáles on 30 December 2020

It was August 26, 2020. Dirlene Mejía, a park ranger who works in the area around Concepción Lake, a protected area located in eastern Bolivia, had just left for her usual route. When she approached the lakeshore, she noticed an unusual number of dead fish. Surprised by what she had found, she began to walk around the lake. With each step, she found more dead animals.

Mejía immediately shared her discovery with her superiors, who then advised the mayor’s office in the Pailón municipality. In an interview with Mongabay Latam, the municipal office confirmed that the dead fish covered about 10 kilometers (about 6 miles) of beach around the southern part of the lake.



Dead fish litter the shore of Concepción Lake. Photo by Hubert Vaca.

However, what seemed to be a shocking discovery was not surprising for Erwin Menacho, a 66-year-old resident of El Cerrito, a community about 10 kilometers (about six miles) from the protected area. Menacho said he previously witnessed a similar event in 2001.

“There were many lifeless fish … scattered throughout the entire lake. It was like an animal cemetery; it was very sad to see so much death,” said Menacho, recalling the incident from almost 20 years ago.

. . .

Agroindustrial takeover

In May 2002, Concepción Lake was declared a Ramsar Site, which is a categorization awarded to certain wetlands for being important reserves of water and biodiversity. In July 2002, the mayor’s office in the Pailón municipality also decided to create the Concepción Lake Municipal Protected Area.

At the time, activities related to livestock already existed around the body of water, but only on private property. The mayor’s office in the Pailón municipality has identified a total of 13 properties around the lake. “It has been verified that livestock activity and the free transit of these animals around the southern part of the lake have caused soil compaction,” said Nadir Arias, head of the Pailón municipality environmental unit. Arias is particularly concerned by two Mennonite communities —California and El Cerrito— that are operating within the protected area within five kilometers (about three miles) from the lake.

More:
https://news.mongabay.com/2020/12/industrial-agriculture-threatens-a-wetland-oasis-in-bolivia/

Also posted in Environment and energy:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/1127142360

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Industrial agriculture threatens a wetland oasis in Bolivia (Original Post) Judi Lynn Dec 2020 OP
Alrighty, then! Stumbled across an update on these Mennonite farmers in Bolivia! Judi Lynn Dec 2020 #1
How horrible.nt nam78_two Dec 2020 #2

Judi Lynn

(160,219 posts)
1. Alrighty, then! Stumbled across an update on these Mennonite farmers in Bolivia!
Thu Dec 31, 2020, 03:44 AM
Dec 2020

Someone asked me if they were growing quinoa, which we know is a huge crop in Bolivia. I went to check to see what they grow, in the article, which mentions sorgham, corn, soy, and sunflorwers, then I remembered posting about these guys years ago at D.U., in a story which astounds and disgusts!

A quick check dredged up this article from the BBC which I totally missed last year!

The rapes haunting a community that shuns the 21st Century
By Linda Pressly
BBC News, Bolivia

Published16 May 2019

In Manitoba, an insular Mennonite colony in Bolivia whose residents eschew modernity, a group of men were rounded up in 2009. Later, they were convicted of the rape and sexual assault of 151 women and girls - including small children - within this small Christian community. So why are Manitoba's leaders now lobbying to free the men from prison?

Unpaved dirt roads run alongside fields of soya and sunflowers and connect the far-flung houses of Manitoba, home to 1,800 people. Treads from the iron wheels of tractors are sunk deep into the mud - rubber tyres are prohibited on motorised vehicles, deemed too modern.

The hot, still air is occasionally stirred by the passing of a trotting horse pulling a buggy laden with women in wide straw hats and men in dark dungarees.

This is the principal form of transport in Manitoba. For members of the colony, driving a car or motorcycle is banned and punishable by excommunication by the bishop and ministers.

To outsiders, it looked like a peaceful, if mysterious, haven from the modern world. Then in June 2009 the prosecutor for the district of Santa Cruz received a call from a police officer in the eastern Bolivian town of Cotoca.

More:
https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-48265703

~ ~ ~
These events have been mentioned at DU since 2009. Unbelievably ugly! That's when I started posting articles on them:

On edit, I tried this link, an AP story and it has been retired. Sorry.

Here's what I posted then:
Bolivia arrests 8 Mennonite men accused of raping more than 60 women at their farm community
6-24-09
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3936513


Bolivia arrests 8 Mennonite men accused of raping more than 60 women at their farm community
By Associated Press
11:33 PM EDT, June 23, 2009

LA PAZ, Bolivia (AP) — Eight men from a Mennonite farming community in eastern Bolivia have been accused of raping dozens of females at the settlement, a prosecutor said Tuesday, indicating at least one victim was an underage girl.

Prosecutor Freddy Perez told The Associated Press that 60 women, from 11 to 47 years old, have accused the men of rape. He said the men were suspected of using a form of aerosol spray to drug the women.

"Members of the community told us that for religious reasons, and because they didn't have electric lighting, they didn't move about late at night, but these youths did and were spotted jumping into the windows of houses," he said.

~snip~
Mennonites belong to a conservative Christian sect that does without most modern conveniences and limits contact with outsiders.

Read more: http://www.courant.com/news/nationworld/wire/sns-ap-lt-bolivia-mennonites,0,6903705.story

~ ~ ~

Mennonite father dies in Bolivia after being hung for nine hours
9-17-09
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x6579451

~ ~ ~

Bolivian Mennonites jailed for serial rapes
8-26-11



http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x623866


On edit, I tried this link, from Time Magazine, and it says the page doesn't exist any longer. Here's what I posted at the time:

A Verdict in Bolivia's Shocking Case of the Mennonite Rapes

Earlier this month: A Verdict in Bolivia's Shocking Case of the Mennonite Rapes
A Verdict in Bolivia's Shocking Case of the Mennonite Rapes
By Jean Friedman-Rudovsky / Manitoba Colony Wednesday, Aug. 17, 2011

Katarina Wall remembers little about the worst night of her life. She recalls waking up in her bed, seeing a man on top of her and feeling her arms too heavy to lift in resistance. The next thing she knew, it was morning — but her pajamas were torn, and the sheets beneath her and her sleeping husband were stained with blood from her vagina. "It was like a terrible dream," Wall, 36, tells TIME in her native Low German, weeping as she stands outside a courthouse in Santa Cruz, Bolivia.

But the nightmare appears to be all too real. Wall is among 130 women and girls of the Mennonite colony in Manitoba Colony, who claim that from 2005 to '09, the same cloudy horror visited them. They're the victims of what is allegedly one of the ugliest sex scandals in the history of the Mennonites, a pacifist Christian Anabaptist denomination founded in Europe in the 1500s, if not Bolivia and South America. In a criminal trial now under way in nearby Santa Cruz, Peter Weiber, 48, a Mennonite veterinarian, is accused of transforming a chemical meant to anesthetize cows into a spray to be used on humans. For four years, Weiber and eight other Mennonite men allegedly sprayed the chemical through bedroom windows in Manitoba at night, sedating entire families and raping the females. One of the men is a fugitive, the others have pleaded not guilty. If convicted, each faces a maximum 30-year prison sentence.

The criminal charges detail depraved acts few would expect inside a supposedly upright sect like the Mennonites. "When there were no grown women" in the houses that the men allegedly targeted, says Wilfredo Mariscal, an attorney for the victims, "they did what they wanted with the kids." Court-ordered medical exams reveal a 3-year-old girl with a broken hymen (most likely, doctors note, from finger and not penis penetration). The formal indictments list victims ages 8 to 60 years old, including one who is mentally retarded and another who was pregnant and sent into premature labor after allegedly being raped by one of the men — her brother.

More than 50,000 Mennonites with roots in Canada and Germany populate the Bolivian lowlands, and they are notoriously reclusive, especially in ultraconservative "old colonies" like Manitoba Colony. Their world of horse-drawn buggies and sorghum fields is segregated from the surrounding indigenous country; cars and electricity are prohibited, as are music, sports and television. Women's lives are even more circumscribed. They don't attend school after the age of 12 and, unlike many Mennonite men, rarely learn Spanish. They wear uniform, hand-sewn dresses, raise large families and seldom venture to (and almost never beyond) bustling Santa Cruz, three hours by car and cultural light-years away from Manitoba.

More:
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2087711,00.html

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=103x623867







~ ~ ~

So in addition to running wild with their farming, taking land without even getting legal proof of sale for it, and then destroying the environment, they also have this criminal history of assault on the women members. That's the way I'm reading it.

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