February 2008 e-Update/Crisis Appeal

STOP THE DESTRUCTION OF NGOBE LIVES!

The Ngobe of Panama urgently need your support. Within a few weeks their way of life will be gone forever.

Their homes are being leveled, their lands dynamited, and their territory will be flooded, all to make way for a hydroelectric dam being built by AES Corporation-an American company and the Panamanian government.

Initially AES used deception and pressure tactics to force residents into signing away their land. When the people peacefully protested in December, the company and the government responded by bringing in police in riot gear who beat the Ngobe protestors, knocking down mothers with babies on their backs, breaking a young girl's arm and her brother's nose, and carrying off 54 people to jail, including two infants.

The company is now bulldozing houses and dynamiting the landscape to build their dam. The situation has reached a crisis point!

This is only the first of 47 dams planned by the Panamanian government on indigenous lands. Stopping this dam now will have a ripple effect, slowing down all the others until indigenous peoples can be brought into the process and their rights respected.

We are fighting on every front--in the Panamanian courts, with industry watchdog groups, and at the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, but these are expensive undertakings. 

We urgently need to raise $5,000 so we can get up to the Ngobe villages and help them with their legal appeals. And we need another $5,000 to pay for the initial expenses of pursuing an injunction through the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.

Your donation now in any amount will help ensure that the Ngobe can keep their homes and remain in their communities. Please give generously while there is still time to help. The Ngobe and all the other indigenous peoples of Panama will thank you for it.