The Zanjón, the nucleus of the Alto Golfo de California y Delta del Río Colorado Biosphere Reserve in northwest Mexico, where the Cocopah have fished for a living for centuries. The restrictions on fishing condemn them to extinction. Credit: Courtesy of Prometeo Lucero

By Daniela Pastrana
EL MAYOR, Mexico , Sep 8 2014 (IPS)

In their language, Cocopah means “river people”. For over 500 years the members of this Amerindian group have lived along the lower Colorado River and delta in the Mexican states of Baja California and Sonora and the U.S. state of Arizona.

They fish and make crafts for a living, have strong family ties, and are united by their Kurikuri or rituals and funeral ceremonies – and, now, by the struggle to keep from disappearing, in a battle led by their women. Today, the Cocopah number just over 1,300 people, most of whom live in Arizona.

“I’m Hilda Hurtado Valenzuela. I’m a fisherwoman. And I am Cocopah,” says the president of the Cocopah Indigenous People Cooperative Society.

She and other women of this community introduce themselves this way at an assembly attended by IPS, held to discuss the federal government’s promise to finally consult them about a fishing ban which took away their livelihood and practically condemns them to extinction.“The case of the Cocopah is an example of how ultra-conservationist policies can endanger the existence of a native community.” -- Lawyer Yacotzin Bravo

“No government has the right to take our habitat from us,” Hurtado told IPS during a visit to the El Mayor Cocopah Indigenous Community, where the Red de Periodistas de a Pie (Journalists on Foot Network) and the Mexican Commission for the Defence and Promotion of Human Rights are carrying out a project for the protection of human rights defenders, financed by the European Union.

In May, the 61-year-old Hurtado, a mother of four and grandmother of 10, sat down on the road connecting the port of San Felipe on the Gulf of California with Mexicali, the capital of the state of Baja California, which abuts the U.S., and refused to budge until the federal government formalised its promise to hold a consultation with the local communities.

“The government agreed to do something that it should have done 25 years ago,” said the lawyer Ricardo Rivera de la Torre of the Citizens Commission of Human Rights of the Northwest, an organisation that has been documenting violations of civil rights in Baja California since 2004.

Rivera de la Torre and Raúl Ramírez Baena took the case to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2008.

“The government violated the Cocopah’s people’s right to consultation as outlined in the International Labour Organisation’s Convention 169,” which Mexico ratified in 1990, said Ramírez Baena.

ILO Convention 169 Concerning Indigenous and Tribal Peoples requires prior consultation of local indigenous communities before any project is authorised on their land.

But in 1993, without any prior consultation, the government decreed the creation of the Alto Golfo de California y Delta del Río Colorado Biosphere Reserve. The nucleus of the reserve is the Zanjón, where the Cocopah have fished for the Gulf weakfish (Cynoscion othonopterus) for centuries.

The Gulf weakfish lay their eggs between February and May in shallow waters in the Gulf of California where the states of Sonora and Baja California meet, and the fish are widely sold during Lent, when Catholics abstain from eating meat on Fridays.

After the biosphere reserve was created, a Reserve Management Plan was adopted in 1995, along with a string of laws and regulations – such as the Law on Ecological Balance and a fishing quota and ban – which restricted the fishing activities of the Cocopah to levels that have made it impossible for them to make a living.

“The case of the Cocopah is an example of how ultra-conservationist policies can endanger the existence of a native community,” said Yacotzin Bravo, another lawyer with the Citizens Commission of Human Rights of the Northwest.

A group of Cocopah women in the Indiviso ejido, in the El Mayor Cocopah Indigenous Community in the Mexican state of Baja California, during an assembly where they discussed how to carry out a consultation on reforming the regulations and laws that limit their fishing in the biosphere reserve. Credit: Courtesy of Prometeo Lucero

The Mexican constitution defines indigenous people as the descendants of the populations that inhabited the area before the state was formed and who preserve their ancestral cultural or economic institutions.

Article 2 of the constitution establishes that native people have “preferential access” to the nation’s natural assets.

“Indigenous rights are the rights of peoples,” expert in indigenous law Francisco López Bárcenas told IPS. “Not of persons, not of municipalities, not of rural communities. With respect to indigenous rights, we are talking about the appropriation of territory, which is necessary for a people to be able to exist as such.

“They depend for a living on fishing, on a close relationship with their natural surroundings. It’s not only about money. First, as a result of the laws on agriculture, their territories were shrunk to small spaces, and now their main livelihood activity is reduced. And if they can’t fish, they have to go to other parts to find work,” he said.

Every year, just after the waning moon, the weakfish begin their migration to the shallow waters of the Colorado River delta, and fishing season starts.

The Cocopah go to sea in their “pangas” or fishing boats and sit quietly until they hear the weakfish and throw their “chinchorros” or nets. The Cocopah capture between 200 and 500 tons of fish per season.

“What the government has done with us is segregation,” Juana Aguilar González, the president of the El Mayor Cocopah Rural Production Society, told Tierramérica. “They know that we Indians don’t threaten the environment.”

The Cocopah are not the only ones who catch weakfish. There are also two non-indigenous cooperatives in the area – San Felipe in Baja California and Santa Clara in Sonora – with a fishing capacity 10 times greater, according to statistics from the governmental National Commission for Knowledge and Use of Biodiversity (CONABIO).

The weakfish “captured by the Cocopah are approximately 10 percent of the recommended quota, which shows that the fishing done by that indigenous community, even if they fish in the nucleus of the reserve, does not hurt the ecological balance or threaten the species with extinction,” says recommendation 8/2002 of the National Human Rights Commission addressed to the ministries of the environment and agriculture.

“The decree creating the reserve changed our lives,” Mónica González, the daughter of the late Cocopah governor Onésimo González, said sadly. “Now, instead of being busy organising our dances, we have to be worried about the legal action, the trials, confiscations and arrests.”

The Cocopah, descendants of the Yumano people, are one of the five surviving indigenous groups in Baja California.

In the 17th century, some 22,000 Cocopah were living in the Colorado River delta. Today there are only 1,000 in the Cocopah Indian Reservation in the southwest corner of Arizona, and just over 300 in Mexico, in Baja California and Sonora, according to the governmental National Commission for the Development of Indigenous Peoples.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) , Cocopah is an endangered language. There are only 10 Cocopah speakers still alive. Years ago one of them, 44-year- old Mónica González, began to make an effort to revive the language.

“Sometimes I think our leaders talk about the Cocopah as if we had already died, but we are alive and still putting up a struggle,” she told IPS.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

The Supreme Court has struck down requirements demanding proof of citizenship during voter registration. Credit: Korean Resource Centre/CC by 2.0

By Cydney Hargis
WASHINGTON, Jun 17 2013 (IPS)

In a landmark decision, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday struck down voter application requirements demanding proof of citizenship, making it much easier for naturalised citizens to register to vote.

The decision looked at the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which does not require proof of citizenship, as well as state-level legislation in the western state of Arizona. In a 7-2 decision, the nine Supreme Court justices ruled the state’s voting requirement, which has been in effect for two years, unconstitutional.

“The anti-immigration sentiment [in Arizona] is unconstitutional and people aren’t going to tolerate it,” Petra Falcon, executive director of Promise Arizona, an Arizona-based immigrant advocacy group, told IPS. “We need decision-makers that appreciate the diversity in our communities.”

The 1993 Voter Registration Act, known as the “Motor Voter” law, requires applicants to sign an oath, punishable as perjury, stating that they are U.S. citizens. But it does not require any proof.

“It’s extremely inadequate,” Arizona Attorney General Thomas Horne, who argued the case before the Supreme Court, said of the 1993 legislation in March. “It’s essentially an honour system. It does not do the job.”

Yet others have applauded the Motor Voter law, with civil liberties advocates suggesting that the legislation significantly eased voter registration by issuing a standard registration form nationwide.

Arizona went a step further, however, by requiring all first-time applicants to provide citizenship in the form of a birth certificate, a passport or naturalisation documents, without which the application would be rejected.

Several other states, including Alabama, Georgia, Kansas and Tennessee, have similar requirements, and Monday’s ruling will now directly affect those laws.

“This decision reaffirms the principle that states may not undermine this critical law’s effectiveness by adding burdens not required under federal law,” Laughlin McDonald, director emeritus of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Voting Rights Project, said Monday.

“The court has taken a vital step in ensuring the ballot remains free, fair and accessible for all citizens,” McDonald added.

Those opposed to Proposition 200, as Arizona’s law was called, highlighted the enormous problem it creates for naturalised citizens. Using a naturalisation document as proof of citizenship requires applicants to register in person as opposed to through the mail, because federal law prohibits the copying of naturalisation documents.

The ACLU estimates that about 13 million people in the United States lack documentation to prove their citizenship. It also estimates that 31,000 Arizona residents who attempted to register during the two years the law has been in effect were denied, 90 percent of them born in the United States. And in two years in a single Arizona county, community voter registration reportedly dropped by 44 percent.

Advocates say Thursday’s ruling offers the opportunity to start healing some of those wounds.

“Justice is on our side,” Falcon told IPS. “We are working towards rebuilding a united Arizona and one Arizona, rather than a divided Arizona.”

Attempts to tighten requirements

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion, emphasised that Arizona is allowed to ask the federal government to include the extra documents as a state-specific voter-registration requirement. He also noted that states can take the federal government to court if it refuses to do so.

State officials can also check other information on the voter registration form and refuse to register the applicant if it turns out they are not citizens.

Conservatives’ response to the ruling has already been fierce.

“This hole in federal statutory laws allows non-citizens to register and thereby encourages voter fraud,” Senator Ted Cruz, from Texas, said Monday. Cruz also announced that he would file an amendment to currently pending immigration legislation to allow states to require identification before registering voters.

Monday’s decision comes as voting rights activists eagerly await another race-based voting case before the Supreme Court. This case deals with a section of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that requires states with a history of discrimination, including Arizona, to receive clearance from the Justice Department before they change their voting laws.

That decision is expected within days.

Arizona has been in the vanguard of a new spate of conservative-led state governments attempting to crack down on illegal immigration. Last year, the Supreme Court also decided that a number of laws in Arizona were unconstitutional.

Yet the most controversial one, a law requiring police officers to check the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant, was allowed to stand. Critics say the court’s decision greenlighted racial profiling.

“This is a country of immigrants but also of U.S. values,” said Falcon. “We want to embrace those values rather than run away from them and abuse them.”

In a long-awaited decision with potential electoral consequences, the U.S. Supreme Court Monday struck down three out of four provisions of a controversial Arizona law aimed against undocumented immigrants.

A five-to-three majority of the court ruled that those provisions, including one making it a crime for undocumented immigrants to seek work, went beyond existing federal immigration law. It has been a long-established principle in U.S. constitutional law that federal law “pre-empts” state law if they conflict.

But the court unanimously upheld the law’s single-most controversial provision – sometimes referred to as the “show-me-your-papers” law – that would require local police under certain conditions to check on a person’s immigration status if they have been detained or arrested in connection with the violation or enforcement of other laws.

Reacting to the decision, President Barack Obama, whose Justice Department challenged the Arizona law soon after its enactment in 2010, said he was “pleased” with the Court’s decision to strike down those provisions that conflicted with federal immigration law.

“At the same time,” he added, “I remain concerned about the practical impact of the remaining provision of the Arizona law that requires local law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of anyone they even suspect to be here illegally.

“Going forward, we must ensure that Arizona law enforcement officials do not enforce this law in a manner that undermines the civil rights of Americas…,” he went on, adding that the court’s ruling showed the need for Congress to enact “comprehensive immigration reform”.

A number of civil rights groups also reacted negatively to the court’s decision to let the “papers” provision stand, suggesting that they will soon be filing their own lawsuits against the measure once Arizona begins enforcing it.

“By re-instating the ‘show-me-your-papers’ for now, the court has left the door open to racial profiling and illegal detentions in Arizona,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). “We have amassed an 8.77 million dollar war chest to fight those battles in court and to counter any and every anti-immigrant copycat measure in other states.”

“The xenophobic virus in Arizona must be contained before it spreads to other states,” he added.

But Arizona Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who claimed that the “heart of the law” had been upheld by the court, insisted that “racial profiling will not be tolerated” by her administration.

The court’s ruling comes at a critical moment in the 2012 election campaign and could influence its outcome, particularly in so-called swing states with large Hispanic populations, including Arizona and several of its Rocky Mountain neighbours, as well as Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia.

Despite a significant reduction in Latino immigration since the 2008 financial crisis, the overall U.S. Latino population has increased by more than 40 percent over the past decade – to more than 50 million. Much of that growth has been concentrated in the Rocky Mountain states, Texas and the southeast.

Obama won about two-thirds of the Latino vote nationwide in 2008 and hopes to equal or surpass that percentage in November.

In a move that drew enthusiastic support from many Latinos, Obama announced earlier this month that his administration will stop deporting undocumented immigrants under the age of 30 who entered the U.S. as children, have no criminal records, and have either served in the U.S. armed forces or graduated from a high school or the equivalent.

Approximately 800,000 people – the vast majority Latino – are expected to benefit from the action.

With just a few exceptions, Republicans – including their presumptive presidential candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney – have come out against Obama’s action, as they have against any measure that they construe as granting “amnesty” to any of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

For the most part, they have also rallied behind the Arizona law and similar or even more severe “copycat” laws enacted over the past two years by legislatures in Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and several other states. During the primary campaign, Romney endorsed the Arizona law, although Florida Senator Marco Rubio, touted as a possible vice-presidential running-mate, has denounced it.

“I believe that each state has the duty – and the right – to secure our borders and preserve the rule of law, particularly when the federal government has failed to meet its responsibilities,” Romney said Monday in a statement that charged Obama with having “fail(ed) to provide any leadership on immigration”.

Romney’s political problems in reacting to the ruling were noted by Michael Shear of The Caucus blog of the New York Times. “More specific expressions of support for the law’s controversial provisions would be likely to undermine his efforts to increase support among Latinos. But if Mr. Romney distances himself from the Arizona law, he runs the risk of alienating conservative Tea Party supporters who back aggressive enforcement.”

The three provisions of the law that were found to unconstitutionally undermine federal law included criminalising undocumented immigrants who fail to register as such under a federal law or who work or try to find work in the state, and a third that authorised police to arrest people if they have probable cause to believe they had committed crimes that would make them deportable under federal law.

The Justice Department took the position that the fourth provision – the “show me your papers” provision – also went beyond federal law, a position also taken by the appeals court which heard the case before Arizona appealed it to the Supreme Court.

But the justices disagreed, although they also noted that much would depend on how the law was implemented. “This opinion does not foreclose other pre-emption and constitutional challenges to the law as interpreted and applied after it goes into effect,” Kennedy wrote for the majority.

He also stressed that “detaining individuals solely to verify their immigration status would raise constitutional concerns.”

Indeed, a number of Latino and other civil society groups stressed that they intended both to closely scrutinise Arizona’s application of the law and file suits on other grounds against its enforcement.

“The Supreme Court …failed to decisively remove the bull’s eye on the backs of Arizona’s Latinos, leaving it to future lawsuits to address,” declared the National Council of La Raza. “Those challenges will come, because this provision legitimises racial profiling and should not be allowed to stand in Arizona or anywhere else.”

“Knowing as we know, that the intention behind the anti-immigrant Arizona law is to see the largest number of people possible be ejected from the U.S., we find the U.S. Supreme Court decision as a dangerous sanctioning of what could become a witch hunt against foreign-born populations,” noted Angela Sanbrano, president of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities (NALACC).

“Now more than ever, it will be crucial to closely scrutinise the action by local law enforcement agencies in Arizona.”

New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) also expressed dismay with the ruling and scepticism over Brewer’s assurances that the law will not result in racial profiling.

“The Supreme Court ruling opens the door to anti-immigrant abuses we’ve seen in other states with similar laws,” said Grace Meng, an HRW researcher. “The court said it was too soon to know what harm there might be from this one provision, but the harm from a similar provision in Alabama is all to clear.”