Permanecer en la Tierra, Stay Grounded’s regional network of Latin America and the Caribbean, attended the Global Gathering for Climate and Life – Anti-COP 2024 that took place in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. Represented by our member organisation CPOOEM (Coordination of original inhabitants and organisations from Eastern State of Mexico in defense of land, water and culture), Permanecer en la Tierra was part of a panel presenting past and ongoing struggles against airport expansion in Mexico and an analysis of how airports are part of an extractivist economic model incompatible with a just and prosperous life for all. Below is the final declaration from the gathering.
“Through the mirrors and reflections of our existences-resistances, we see similarities and differences that reveal the diversity of cultural roots of every geography of the planet, where our environments transform and transmute us collectively.
Our mirrors project human lives with identities, memories, and multiple histories against historical assaults. Even amid cultural differences, our history is common about the dispossession and destruction configured in our territories—bringing pain and human suffering, as well as with the destruction and death of Mother Nature.
These experiences signify shared challenges faced by societies, peoples, and organized communities around the world, prompting us to rethink, share, and bond beyond borders, flags, and cultures—reclaiming the future amid adversity.
Thus, these gazes through the mirror observe, feel, and dream alongside the Other who gazes from the other side of the reflection.”
In Defense of Land, Water, Territories, Climate Justice, and Life in the Global South
From the five continents of the planet, with the presence of representatives from the Waorani, Yaqui, Purépecha, Zapotec, Chatino, Mixtec, Ngiwa, Chontales, Wayuu, Ikoots, Sami, Mundurukú K’Ana, Kanak, Maya Q’eqchi, mundurukú and nasa peoples, and from the geographies known as Colombia, Zambia, Aruba, Bonaire, West Papua, Baluchistan, Bolivia, El Salvador, Ecuador, Zimbabwe, Canada, Peru, Benin, Germany, the Netherlands, Guatemala, Switzerland, Romania, South Africa, Argentina, the U.S., New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom, Portugal, Kenya, Western Sahara, Palestine, Brazil, New Caledonia, Singapore, the Basque Country, Samoa, Kurdistan, Italy, Antigua and Barbuda, and Mexico, we have carried our dead and our histories to gather in Oaxaca—in unity, as peoples, communities, and movements of the Global South—to raise our voices against the global water crisis, militarization and megaprojects, the forced displacement of our communities, the commodification of life, as well as the inaction of governments and international organizations in the face of the climate crisis, which marks a war against our peoples and nature. The AntiCOP emerges as an autonomous, decentralized response, a space to articulate our struggles and propose concrete alternatives that strengthen our territories, enable us to defend our natural resources, and dignify our ways of life.
We denounce the danger of Donald Trump’s return to the U.S. presidency as a severe symptom of a civilizational crisis and a threat to climate justice and human rights, especially for racialized peoples. While we know that both competing parties follow logics of dispossession, discrimination, and genocide, his specific policies, based on nationalism, racism, and hostility towards migrants, reinforce structural violence at borders and perpetuate a global system of inequality. This is part of the global rise of the far right, pushing an international order of exclusion, xenophobia, and neo-colonialist extractivism, in which the peoples of the Global South and migrants are sacrificed for economic growth and territorial expansion.
The criminalization of migrants, journalists, human rights defenders, on top of the militarization of territories, restrict the self-determination of the peoples of the South. In this context, migration becomes an act of resistance against extractivist policies and climate crises. Borders, more than physical walls, transform into invisible barriers that limit human rights and access to dignity.
Megaprojects, driven by leaders and entrepreneurs from both the far right and even «progressives,» are reshaping territories in the name of progress and development, creating unsustainable living conditions in communities affected by the extraction and overexploitation of natural resources. These initiatives deepen the effects of the climate crisis and displace people to the borders of states that deny their right to mobility. At the same time, they intensify territorial dispossession and perpetuate the exploitation of the peoples of the Global South, using borders as tools of control to protect the interests of global elites.
Governments, corporations, and criminal groups continue to wage a profound war against peoples and nature to sustain this heteropatriarchal, capitalist, colonial system that threatens to destroy the planet. This war is disguised through institutional and official processes that fail to resolve structural conflicts or meet collective territorial needs. Because of it, we are heading into a world of catastrophic global warming, advancing towatds 2.6 to 3.1°C by the end of the century, challenging the planetary balance and the survival of humanity.
All COPs Are Bastards! COP29 seeks to conceal, under a hypocritical greenwashing, Azerbaijan’s past of genocide and ecocide, and the atrocities committed against the Armenian people, which are not only terrible chapters of history but also echoes of how war and the exploitation of resources and people are intertwined, exacerbating the climate and social crises we face. The omission of the Palestinian Genocide during COP28 in Dubai is another clear example of this.
The current capitalist system has led us to a world where wildlife has declined by 73% in just 50 years. Just a few days ago, COP16 on Biodiversity concluded in Cali, Colombia, where, despite some achievements made by indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and rural communities, in general showed only a simulated concern for Mother Nature, our natural resources, and the territories that protect 80% of the world’s biodiversity.
In light of this, we ask again: will we wait another 30 years for the governments and corporations that control the COPs to ensure that nothing changes? It is clear to us that to save life, the people only have the people—and organized anger is our horizon. With this premise and in anticipation of the imminent COP30 (to be held in Belém, Brazil, in 2025), we make a broad, diverse, decentralized, and combative call to meet in the Amazon to continue dialoguing and building from horizontality and political diversity.
These reflections highlight the urgency and need for unity among the peoples and movements of the Global South, as well as the Souths within the Global North, to confront the multiple crises affecting our lives and territories. After five days of work, the more than 250 people who participated in the Global Meeting for Climate and Life: ANTICOP 2024, wish to share our collective feelings, thoughts, and reflections.
Community Water Management
For the first time in human history, due to unsustainable water use and the climate crisis, the hydrological cycle is unbalanced, endangering half of global food production. We reaffirm that water is a fundamental human right essential for life and not a commodity. Community management of water commons, through local and independent water committees, is essential to implement community-driven solutions such as rainwater harvesting or filtration systems. We also propose adopting sustainable alternatives, such as dry toilets. We must protect water from the extractive interests of industries that prioritize their profits over the human right to water.
Intercultural Environmental Education
Intercultural environmental education will be key to raising awareness among new generations about the importance of defending nature, water, biodiversity, and water care systems from a perspective that incorporates both scientific and ancestral knowledge. We must empower youth to defend their territories through critical awareness of the extractive and mercantile consumption model that has led us to the current crisis. We propose adopting responsible production and consumption systems in our homes and communities.
Global Networks of Resistance and Coordination & Collective Struggle Calendar
We call for the creation of a global network for climate and life—“AntiCOP”—a digital and physical space that connects our struggles in defense of the land, territory, water, climate justice, and community rights. This network will allow for sharing experiences, resources, and coordinating synchronized actions worldwide, amplifying our voices and ensuring our demands are visible to international authorities. We also propose coordinating a collective struggle calendar for 2025, using key dates like Indigenous Resistance Day to strengthen our resistance and advocate for our demands.
Regional AntiCOPs and Mobilization Towards COP30
Regional AntiCOPs will be essential for making collective decisions, highlighting our local demands, and connecting our struggles. We propose protest caravans that will traverse across various territories towards the site of COP30. Through this, we aim to spotlight the resistance of our peoples and demand climate justice.
Safe Spaces and Protection for Activists and Land Defenders
Activism in defense of land, territory, water, and nature is dangerous, and many of our comrades face stigmatization, harassment, repression, criminalization, and even murder. Since the signing of the Paris Climate Agreement, over 1,500 environmental defenders have been killed around the world—the vast majority in Global South countries. We demand safe spaces for activists, where they can heal and protect themselves physically, emotionally, and legally. We also propose creating networks and support mechanisms for legal, communication, technological, psychological, and physical and digital security for human rights defenders, land defenders, and environmental activists in the most vulnerable territories.
Catalog and Repository of Effective Actions
We propose creating a catalog of effective actions and best practices to share proven experiences and strategies in the fight for the defense of land, territory, and water. We will also launch printed and digital publications that reflect our stories, struggles, and proposals from an anti-colonial, anti-patriarchal, and biocentric perspective, challenging cultural extractivism and highlighting our demands.
Autonomous Fund for Climate Disasters
In light of the failure of official adaptation and loss and damage funds, we call for the creation of an autonomous and collective fund to face the climate disasters affecting our communities, free from intermediaries that discredit our efforts.
New International Economic Order
We propose developing proposals to reclaim the economic, food, and territorial autonomy of the peoples of the Global South, demanding the annulment of colonial debts and financing from all financial institutions that perpetuate extractivism. We also demand the return of looted goods from the Global North. We must empower our communities by making them aware that it is the financial institutions, the rich and powerful people of the North, who are in debt to our territories, which have been plundered and fragmented to finance their development.
After these reflections, we have decided to share what we are, what we do, and what we dream of—the things that went well, but also those that went wrong. Our victories and defeats—our needs, but also our capacities, tools, skills, and all the commitment we carry in our hearts to build that other world where many worlds can coexist. Thus, we have set ourselves the goal to:
Proposals and Solutions:
Consolidate a global network for climate and life that amplifies and supports local, community, and territorial struggles on a global level.
Map extractivist projects and identify their sources of funding in the territories, generating impact reports and local case studies. This will allow us to document the effects of megaprojects and plan resistance strategies based on data.
Strengthen the exercise of the free self-determination of peoples, ensuring that communities receive clear and detailed information about the projects that affect them, guaranteeing respect for their decisions and local leadership, ensuring Free, Prior, Informed, and Good Faith Consent. This is to uphold the right to free self-determination and not to legitimize projects imposed by the state.
Promote sexual education and a culture of psycho-emotional self-care through community alternatives to combat sexual and heteropatriarchal violence, exacerbated by extractivism and colonialist megaprojects, which particularly affect indigenous women defending their territories, especially trans women.
Promote student organization through training to mobilize youth and student movements against fossil fuels and extractivist industries.
Raise global public awareness that the climate crisis and ecocide are a war against people and nature.
Recover pre-colonial lands and practices to promote initiatives for the revitalization of species and ancestral agricultural systems.
Build strong and supportive local and international communities with self-sufficiency initiatives outside the global market, including practices such as tequio (labor for the collective), bartering, and time banks.
Promote the research and implementation of decentralized and community-based renewable energy, as well as fight the stigma that labels us as «anti-development.»
Collect and document successful territorial struggle practices and experiences in a database.
Promote water care through the consolidation of community rainwater harvesting systems, purification, and reuse of greywater; as well as the use of dry toilets to properly manage human waste through composting and its subsequent reincorporation into the soil to nourish it.
We are building a common calendar to concentrate all the activities and actions that we share and have planned for 2025, as well as commemorative and symbolic dates that we reclaim throughout the year within our agendas. For now, we share the following dates and agreements:
- Global Mobilizations for Climate and Life to be held simultaneously in different geographies during November 10, 2025.
- Mesoamerican Caravan for Climate and Life to take place between October 11 and November 10, 2025.
- Meeting in the Amazon during COP30 to share the progress and results of the tasks, work, and commitments made in Oaxaca.
- Mediterranean Meeting Against Wars and Borders to be held in North Africa (dates to be defined)
Publishing the platform Mirrors of the Global South, to become the medium through which we will follow up on digital work and commitments. We invite you to join and support its collective construction.
The AntiCOP is much more than a response to the official COP, it is a meeting and articulation space for people in resistance—a movement that challenges extractivism, green colonialism, and megaprojects that strip our communities of their resources and lands. It is a grassroots articulation that remembers, imagines, and builds other worlds in harmony with ecosystems, biodiversity, and justice. From AntiCOP 2024, we commit to continuing to build together, respecting our differences and recognizing our shared struggles. We are the Global South, the guardians of our lands and cultures. This struggle is ours, and we defend it with determination and unity.
Now, we agree not to remain silent in the face of injustice, criminalization, assault, threat, murder, and the disappearance of those who defend life with their very lives. Our voice has become one, and our message will travel across the five continents.
For the life, land, justice, and dignity of our people!
