If you haven’t seeing Avatar, then you are missing out a good movie, and I suggest you watch it its 3D version. The film excels in creativity, imagination and technical work, the result is overwhelmingly pleasing to the senses.

Avatar is real: Pandora is in Central and South America

by Carlos in DC

If you haven’t seeing Avatar, then you are missing out a good movie, and I suggest you watch it its 3D version. The film excels in creativity, imagination and technical work, the result is overwhelmingly pleasing to the senses.

Most importantly, there is a clear message in the film beyond the typical boy-girl romance story, and that is the main reason to see this film. No, I don’t want to spoil your experience by telling you all about it; however I would like you to understand the context of its main story.

Avatar is real: Pandora exists in South and Central America, and the Na'vi peoples are being displaced and killed right now. The names are different, but the facts are almost the same.

In the next generation, Central and South America will be the next battle fields for rich countries to fight over natural resources like minerals, oil, water, gas, which they need to continue growing and keeping up to their consumerists, excessive ways of life. The last pristine, virgin forests on Earth will be taken over by rich and powerful military armies, working on behalf of the interests of multinational corporations, especially those coming from the U.S., Europe and Canada; and soon India, China, Brazil and of course Russia.

It’s happening already in the Amazonian forests of Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Panama, Ecuador, where mining, oil, tourism, real state and lodging corporations are trying to take over the Indigenous peoples ancestral lands, in complicity with the local puppet governments.

Sebastian Machineri is a leader of the Yaminawa people that live in the border area of Brazil, Peru and Bolivia, deep in the Amazon forest. He was in Washington, DC, recently and told me at the end of a working meeting at Organization of American States that Indigenous peoples in Brazil are being killed, attacked, displaced, and exterminated by the government and the private ranch owners. “I have no hope that anything will change in the future” he also said that international declarations of Indigenous peoples rights -like the OAS- aren’t helping much, when powerful interests are pushing governments to destroy our planet.

In 2009, Indigenous peoples in all over the Americas faced increasing violence, deadly military attacks, displacement, persecution, and incarceration from governments, paramilitaries, guerrillas and military forces linked to corporate interests.

In order to do displace Indigenous peoples, governments and interest groups in Latin America passed special legislation based on the “free-trade” policies models, designed by Wall Street. This has opened the doors of protected areas to any corporation with enough money and the right connections.

Last year in Peru, hundreds of Awajun and Wampis Indigenous farmers were massacred by US-trained militarized police forces of Peru, in the Bagua region. The Natives were protesting government legislation that would allow corporations to take over their lands resources, without previous consultation.

In several regions of Peru, mining corporations are causing pollution and poising Indigenous towns, and many community leaders have been incarcerated when protesting against the government plans to lease 73% of the Amazon forest to corporations, and extensive areas of the Andean mountains. Last year, the Awajun and Wampis peoples of Peru detained five employees from the Canadian mining company IAMGOLD, which did not have any authorization to enter their territory.

Also in Peru, the authorities of Cusco were forced to pass legislation that bans biopiracy or “the appropriation and monopolization of traditional population’s knowledge and biological resources”, in order to prevent the negative effects of the unpopular and controversial U.S.-Peru free trade agreement.

In Colombia, the Amazonian Indigenous peoples are caught in the middle of the internal war between the government, the guerrillas and the government-supported paramilitary. Twenty members of the Awa Indigenous community were killed in 2009 by the guerrilla group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), by the end of the year 74 more Awas were killed by apparent paramilitary groups linked to the illegal drugs traffic.

More than 2,000 Indigenous Embera people in Colombia abandoned their 25 villages from their territory to escape violence from paramilitaries. Meanwhile the Colombian House of Representatives approved a controversial program to convince local Women to submit to sterilization. This same type of program affected over 330,000 Indigenous people in Peru in the 1990’s decade.

According to information posted by Intercontinental Cry, an Indigenous news website, these are some of the most violent attacks faced by Indigenous peoples in Central and South America in 2009:

In central Brazil, the Yanomami community of Paapiu began calling for the immediate expulsion of illegal gold miners occupying their land. Survival International reported, “[the Yanomami] say they are prepared to use bows and arrows to expel the invaders themselves if the authorities do not take immediate action.”

The Guarani Kaiowa community of Apyka´y in Brazil was attacked by ten gunmen, who fired shots in to their camp, wounding one person. The gunmen also beat up and injured others with knives and then set fire to their village. This was the second village torched in less than a week.

As many as 300 troops from Panama’s National Police demolished a Naso village in Bocas del Toro–for the second time. No injuries were reported, however, some 150 adults and 65 children were left with no shelter and limited access to food and water.

Following an overturned eviction, an Ava Guarani indigenous community in Paraguay’s Itakyry district was sprayed with toxic chemicals, most likely pesticide, resulting in nearly the entire village needing medical treatment.

In Guatemala, a group of Maya Mam villagers set fire to a pickup truck and an exploration drill rig, after the Canadian company Goldcorp repeatedly failed to remove the equipment off the community’s land.

In Chile, several Mapuche communities began to reclaim lands in Araucania, a region located in central Chile, which they say were stolen from them in the XVI century during the Hispanic invasion. At least five people have been killed by the Chilean government, which has passed anti-terrorism legislation to imprison and trial Mapuche leaders.

In Ecuador, Indigenous peoples are suing U.S. oil corporations for damages due to land and water pollution, while the leftist government in power tried to betray its electoral promises by selling extensive lands to oil and mining corporations, the response was a strong national strike and social protests.

Meanwhile in Bolivia, Indigenous people, are moving towards self-government under their own cultural traditions, after the December 6 presidential and legislative elections, when 12 of the 327 nation’s municipalities voted in favor of indigenous self-government, giving them control over the natural resources on their land. The same model, but at a smaller scale is being applied in Venezuela, by the government of president Hugo Chavez.

In the U.S. the Obama administration and the biased U.S. media have decided to attack the governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, while remaining silent in the massacres of Indigenous peoples in Peru, Colombia, Brazil, and the violent repression in Chile, Ecuador, and the violent coup regime of Honduras, where death squads trained in the U.S. have reappeared, attacking the Garifuna, Meskito and other Indigenous groups.

The future of South and Central America depends directly of how much power are given to multinational corporations today. In the last decades, Wall Street and London have told the world that small governments are the key for progress of third world countries. The less control, the more democracy, human rights and foreign investment. What we see right now happening in Congo with 6 million people killed and 500,000 raped Congolese is a painful proof of that mistaken model.

Growing in South America, we were told that Indigenous people were exterminated, disseminated, gone. They taught us in the school that nothing was left to reverse the colonization, but there is so much to do in order to stop it. We can see how rich countries are still oppressing poorer nations with with military force like in Sudan, Iraq, Palestine, or with violent forced private "investments" like we see in Latin America.

During the Bush administration, the strategy to take over the natural resources of Latin America was domitated by free-trade agreements (FTA) and the funding of violent conflicts in Colombia, Haiti, and Mexico. In 2009, with Barack Obama in power, the U.S. government has stopped policies but it has announced that will be opening seven military bases in Colombia, while it increased its presence in Peru with possible three military stations.

Colombia is the second biggest recipient in U.S. military aid in the world, after Israel, and its neighbor Venezuela is not taking this too lightly, and has bought armament from Russia, China and possibly Iran. Meanwhile the Pentagon’s South Command increased military exercises conducted with Peru, Panama, and Colombia militaries, while Chile received approval from U.S. Congress to buy high technology missiles.

In the James Cameron's film Avatar, the US military became a sophisticated army of private mercenaries, working for huge profits resulting from extractive industries, and no matter what they need to destroy or who they will kill, they will get the job done.

Beyond the silly way -and offensive for some- that Indigenous peoples are portrayed in this movie as half animals, actually they are the peoples of Avatar, not humans. However in reality that is how some people see our Indigenous peoples in the South side of the Americas, almost as sub humans.

Thus, a mostly-white US war command leadership along with their corporate bosses are leading destructive enterprises in distant regions of green, tropical forests that are rich in beauty but also abundant in minerals and unknown treasures hidden behind human’s eyes. In Central and South America, there are signs of U.S. military and corporate involvement in coups, paramilitary groups, military training of torturers and repressive forces, and financing of anti-Indigenous governments.

In the film as in reality, these thugs are a bunch of cold hearted and insensitive people who would invest tons of money in science, research and cultural programs in order to get into the hearts and minds of Indigenous peoples, who are living in the sacred, untouched, pristine forests of a balanced but fragile environment. Those places are the final destinations for destructive mining machinery, ready to extract the insides of the mother land.

Luckily, not all US soldiers are money-obsessed beasts. Some of them, a multiracial group we should notice in Avatar, take action to protect the Indigenous populations and their sacred land.

As a result of fantastic experiments, some mercenaries become laboraratory-mixed with the Natives and become a new race, mixed, mestizo individuals called Avatar, who are physically similar to the Indigenous, but mentally more aware of certain things. They learn the spirituality and sciences of nature from the “savages” and with time, they learn that mining is not worth the price of the destruction it causes. So they become the protectors of Natives, who using a mixture of knowledge, both human and Indigenous, eventually kick the invaders out of their land by actually killing most of them. Sorry I just told you the movie, but at least I didn't reveal the romantic story part.

Avatar will represent a new step in the filming, not just because it mixes high technology animation with reality fiction, but also Avatar is showing us the most likely future of this planet, presented as fiction but not really.

The possible military conflicts to take place in Central and especially in South America in the next years, are related to corporate greediness and special interests. This is the scary future that awaits for future generations, unless of course, the United States ends its colonialist, imperialistic policies that are designed and dominated by a corporate and military machine regime, and the people regain its true democracy. And the same should happen all over the world, before we become a true Pandora.