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foe
international campaigner Marta Zogbi
reports from the annual meeting of the
inter-american development bank
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The
Inter-American
Development Bank
is the principal
source of multilateral financing for
economic, social and institutional
development projects in Latin America and the
Caribbean .
This year its annual meeting is took place
in Lima between March 29th to 31st.
Calendar of events
around IDB 2004 annual
meeting.
background
information about idb
camisea hypocrisies
Lima March 29 2004
I am new to all this, but according to
expert opinion our meetings in Lima are
setting precedents for collaboration with
other NGOs. Some say that this has never
happened before at an IDB meeting.
Some things have happened that have not come
up in our diaries so far. On March 26, a
large part of our team needed to be at a
meeting about
Regional Infrastructure Integration in South
America
. I, on the other hand, was lucky
enough to be asked to go to a gathering about
the controversial
Camisea gas project
. This
gathering was organized by important
grassroots organisations in Peru from the
jungle, the mountains and the coast: the
regions in which Camisea is causing
irreparable damage.
The video 'Camisea, Risky Business' (a
co-production of
AmazonWatch
,
FoEI, and others) prepared the audience for
speeches by people from affected regions.
Many of them came from the various regions
for the sole purpose of explaining in a few
minutes the health impacts, the deaths, the
lack of prior information, the non-compliance
with environmental conditions that the IDB
had put on the project, etc. The project is
so immense and its construction has caused so
much damage that it is impossible to mention
them all here. What seems most important to
me is that the indigenous people and affected
communities (including artisanal fishermen)
themselves came to tell people what had
happened. The strength of their stories and
the emotions that I felt are hard to
describe.
Of the panelists, Esperanza of
Oilwatch
managed
to reveal many of the hypocrisies that the
IDB put forth in this meeting. She commented
that Camisea is only one example of the
strategies of these institutions, which is to
create the infrastructure to enable the North
to extract resources of the South more
easily.
read the diary from:
saturday march
27
friday march
26
thursday march
25
Read more about the Inter-american
Development Bank:
CENSAT Agua Viva- FoE Colombia:
www.censat.org
(in
spanish)
Rios Vivos Coalition:
www.riosvivos.org.br
(english,
spanish and portuguese)
Bank Information Center, United States:
www.bicusa.org
ACERCA on Plan Puebla Panama:
www.asej.org
IDB website:
www.iadb.org
(english and
spanish)
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