ce399 | research archive

Sin Espíritu, Corazón y Mente Invertida (ce399 artwork)

Sin Espíritu, Corazón y Mente Inversa_ce399. 2009

No offense to horned creatures.

The US Military's Mapping of Mexico's Indigenous Communities

An investigative report into Kansas University's D.O.D. funded mapping project of indigenous land in Oaxaca and San Luis Potosi. By Simon Sedillo

An edited and abridged version of the article "The Demarest Factor: The Ethics of U.S. Department of Defense Funding for Academic Research in Mexico" by Simon Sedillo, of www.elenemigocomun.net.

Background

Lawrence Journal World published an article (October 2006) which quietly uncovered a funding scandal at Kansas University.  In 2005, the Department of Geography received at minimum $500,000 in Department of Defense funds to map communally-held indigenous lands held in San Luis Potosi and Oaxaca, Mexico.

Piqued by LJ World's article, elenemigocomun published a follow-up story "The Road to Hell" (9/26/2007) elaborating upon the dangers of a military-funded mapping project. Since then, we found ourselves among a growing number of community members and students across the U.S./Mexico border investigating those behind the mapping project.

Our concerns have revolved around:

1. academic ethics violations due to lack of transparency with communities about the sources of their research funding,
2. U.S. Army violations of Mexican sovereignty,
3. and violations of indigenous autonomy.

Our collective research has shown that our concerns have indeed been justified.

Bowman Expeditions & Mexico Indigena

Kansas University Dept. of Geography professors Peter Herlihy and Jerome Dobson received funding for their mapping project Bowman Expeditions from the Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO) at Fort Leavenworth.  The Mexican incarnation of the project —Mexico Indigena— began mapping an indigenous region known as "La Huasteca" in 2005, and then moved into areas in the state of Oaxaca amid the 2006 popular uprising of the APPO (Oaxacan People's Popular Assembly).

On the January 14th 2009, UNOSJO (the Union of Organizations of the Sierra Juárez of Oaxaca) released a communique expressing concerns of biopiracy as result of the Mexico Indigena mapping project, claiming that communities were unaware that the primary funder of the project was the FMSO. They cited a lack of  transparency and expressed concerns about the US Army's controversial Human Terrain Mapping System (HTMS).  Indeed, there is compelling evidence that the FMSO is engaging in what they themselves define as "Civil Information Management in Support of Counterinsurgency Operations."

Mexico Indigena's Response

Following the initial elenemigocomun.net article, the Mexico Indigena team released an official response to concerns raised by the military funding.  Since then the scandal has ballooned and several Oaxacan indigenous communities and organizers are demanding answers:  Why were they not told about the military funding?  What will the maps be used for by the military? And is any of this ethical at all?

In the face of these concerns, Professor Dobson individually, his Mexico Indigena team, and the American Geographical Society (AGS) —of which Dobson serves as president— have each released statements claiming transparency, conformance to ethical standards, as well as "the best of intentions" for the indigenous populations under study.  The AGS goes on to deny any involvement with the US Army's HTMS project.

Intentions

The Bowman Expeditions are aptly named after the father of American imperial geographic exploration and imposition, Isaiah Bowman.  A recent biography by Neil Smith, "American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization," reveals a racist, arrogant academic who used science  to advance imperial political and economic impositions around the world.  One example among many that Smith cites is that Bowman captured several indigenous Quechua people and used them as pack animals during his explorations in Peru, leading to the "discovery" of Machu Pichu. 

UNOSJO claims that neither they, nor the communities they represent were ever made aware of FMSO funding behind the Mexico Indigena mapping project.  At a press conference held in February 2009, the Director of UNOSJO Aldo Gonzalez said that originally several Oaxacan communities denied the Mexico Indigena mapping project access to their territory because they noticed a FMSO logo on some of the promotional maps shown to the communities. Later on, new maps were shown without the logo. However, at no point was the funding source ever mentioned to them.

Mexico Indigena team members have also worked in Colombia with FMSO.  In Colombia, counter insurgency and strategic military uses of US Army funded mapping projects cannot be disguised as altruistic or otherwise intended.  Either the Mexico Indigena team is lying about their intentions in Mexico, or they're feigning naivete. Yet the implications and intentions behind a military-funded project are self-evident.

Colonel Demarest: Private Property = Security

The official at FMSO assigned to the Bowman expeditions is Lieutenant Colonel Geoffrey B. Demarest, an IberoAmerica researcher. During a 23-year military career, Demarest served in multiple assignments in Latin America. A graduate of the School of the Americas, his first book Geoproperty considers private property ownership as an issue of national security and strategy.

The Foreign Military Studies Office is a research and analysis center operating under the Deputy Chief of Staff G-2 (Intelligence). FMSO manages and operates the Ft. Leavenworth Joint Reserve Intelligence Center (JRIC) and conducts analytical programs focused on emerging and asymmetric threats, regional military and security developments, and other issues that define evolving operational environments around the world.  Asymmetric threats are defined as terrorist organizations and guerrilla insurgent armies, while emerging threats are being defined as social phenomenon and in particular, social movements.

Six declassified essays published by Lieutenant Colonel Demarest belie the professed innocent intentions of the Bowman Expeditions.  One is entitled "Mapping Colombia: The Correlation Between Land Data and Strategy,"  and another essay by FMSO colleague Major José M. Madera is titled "Civil Information Management in Support of Counterinsurgency Operations: A Case for the Use of Geospatial Information Systems in Colombia." It details the counterinsurgency and intelligence uses of open source GIS information and land data for what the FMSO calls "Civil Information Management."

It's notable that the bulk of the information provided by these texts is in reference to the use of geographic data for ongoing U.S. military operations in Colombia.  The military operation is financed by U.S. taxpayers through funding for Plan Colombia. Although Plan Colombia has brought about little positive results in the last ten years, recently the U.S. government voted to fund a similar plan in Mexico: the Merida Initiative, known among communities and organizers in Mexico as Plan Mexico.  Both plans use the pretext of narcoterrorism to militarize poor and indigenous communities. 

These FMSO essays and Demarest's textbook expose a particularly sinister military ethic, attitude and strategy with regards to the control of large populations of poor people, indigenous people, and the disenfranchised.  This includes the systematic devaluation of any forms of indigenous self governance and self determination.  Cultural identity, as a whole, is regarded as an impediment to prosperity.  Traditional forms of communal land usage and rights, or in Demarest's words "informal land use," is specifically cited as the primary impediment to "progress" and "security." Demarest's essays argue that informal property ownership in both rural and urban settings is a breeding ground for criminal and/or insurrectionary activity. 

Full Article:

http://www.casacollective.org/story/issue-69-march-2009/demarest-factor-ethics-us-department-defense-funding-academic-research-mex

IBM Controls the Nordic Viking Genome

In 1998, Iceland created the world's first national DNA database of its citizens. Almost all of its 275,000 citizens trace their lineages to the original Nordic Vikings of a prior millennium. In a unique arrangement, Iceland's national genetic code was sold to the genetic research and pharmacogenetic industries through an entity called deCODE Genetics. Less than 8 percent of Iceland's population opted out of the voluntary program, hence deCODE possesses virtually a complete national genetic and hereditary portrait of Iceland. Scientists at deCODE are currently utilizing the information in their study of a range of debilitating condition, including respiratory and muscular disease. Safeguards have been built into the program to conceal individuals' names. But at least one Icelander has sued the government to have her father's genetic history removed. As of March 2003, the case is still winding its way through Icelandic courts. Iceland's national genomic information will be made available to a wide variety of scientific, commercial and governmental entities in an Internet-based system that employs massive data storage drives codenamed "Shark." 31

One main company manages and controls Iceland's genetic data. That company is already positioned to become the worldwide manager and disseminator of all genomic information globally. In anticipation of that day, the company currently operates genomic offices in California, New York, Zurich, Haifa, New Delhi and Tokyo. The name of the company is IBM. Its Iceland project operates under a division known as "Life Services - Nordic." 32 

War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race. By Edwin Black. Pg. 439

Related Archive:

http://ce399.typepad.com/weblog/2009/08/humans-are-extinct-part-two.html

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part Three)

When in the early 1990's the U.S. government-funded Human Genome Diversity Project (HGDP) drafted plans for a large genetic database of distinct ethnic populations, it was met with a great deal of controversy and criticism.  Led by scientists such as Luca Cavalli-Sforza and Allan Wilson - both pioneers in the field of population genetics - the HGDP's original aim was to collect DNA from individuals of genetically isolated populations around the world in order to reconstruct the evolutionary path of humankind.  But the initial planning sessions, which were funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the National Human Genome Research Center, the National Institute for General Medical Sciences, and the DoE, quickly became mired in disagreements over which populations to choose for sampling and the best way to define what population means in this context, a context that is as much cultural and anthropological as it is scientific. In addition, groups such as the Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) and Third World Network voiced their concern over the possible implications of such research for those largely indigenous communities who would have their genetic material housed in cell lines in the U.S. institutes. Although HGDP committee members denied that there is any economic motive behind their proposal, critics expressed concern over the way in which indigenous communities were effectively cut out of the planning process.

The controversy was further fueled in 1993 by related but independent incidents. U.S. scientists, with NIH funding, had applied for patents on the genetic material of a Guyami woman from Panama, only with the woman's "verbal consent." A similar case was found with a cell line derived from a Hagahai man from New Guinea. Such instances seemed to RAFI and other groups as an explicit example of colonialism, but now practiced on human genetic material instead of on territories or on natural resources. Native American groups in the United States accused the HGDP of practicing biocolonialism, a term that has been used frequently in describing the practice of sampling genetic material for potential genes of value (be it medical or economic value).  The governments of Panama and the Solomon Islands separately protested to the international community over the patents (one of which was subsequently dropped), and indigenous communities, nongovernmental organizations, and South Pacific governments lobbied for a "lifeforms patent protection treaty." 

At the same time, in the midst of mounting tensions over the HGDP, the World Council of Indigenous Peoples publicly criticized the HGDP, dubbing it the "Vampire Project." Such concern and dissent forced the HGDP committee to draft up a set of "model ethical protocols" (MEPs), and in 1993 the HGDP formed the North American Regional Committee, whose aim was to come up with acceptable criteria for the collection of genetic material from human populations. Written in consultation with leaders from indigenous communities in the United States (because Native American tribes were one major target of the HGDP), the MEP's stressed "informed consent" and the importance of cultural as well as scientific understanding. Since the time, however, the HGDP has been conspicuously silent, and despite the flurry of news items and press releases relating to the various genome mapping endeavors around the world - both government and corporate sponsored - there has been relatively no news or updates on the HGDP's progress.

...bioinformatics involves the use of computer and networking technologies in the organization of updated, networked, and interactive genomic databases being used by research institutions, the biotech industry, medical genetics, and the pharmaceutical industry. Bioinformatics politically signals an important development in the increasing computerization of "wet" biotech research, creating an abstract level where new information technologies can establish the foundation for a new research paradigm of "in silico biology."

...these two trends - the decrease in HGDP's visibility, and the rise of bioinformatics - are inextricably connected. In fact, this twofold trend is striking: on the other, a string of "population genomics" projects, the most visible being the IHSD managed by deCODE Genetics, and the government sponsored U.K. BioBank. Such projects draw our attention to the ways in which race, genomes, and economics are mediated in a complex ways by information technologies. Genomics - the technologically assisted study of the total DNA, or genome, of organisms - currently commands a significant part of the biotech industry's attention. In economic as well as scientific terms, genomics has for some years promised to become the foundation on which a future medical genetics and pharmacogenomics will be based. This chapter attempts to draw out some of the linkages between the biotech industry and the emphasis within genomics programs on diversification and the collection of particular populations genomes into computer databases. Such research programs, which highlight "genetic difference," demonstrate the extent to which culture and biology are often at odds with each other and the extent to which both ethnicity and race are compelled to accommodate the structures of informatics and information.

The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture
Eugene Thacker
MIT Press 2006
ISBN-10: 0-262-20155-0

Related Archives:

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part One)

How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Eugenic Bomb? (Part Two)