Aquila is a small town of roughly 2,000 Nahuatl-speaking inhabitants, nestled in the mountains of southeastern Mexico. Ternium is by far the biggest commercial interest in the area, and according to Aquila locals the company processes between 12,000 and 15,000 tons of ore per day from the Aquila Mine. Local farmers also claim Ternium disposes of hazardous waste without taking proper precautions and that the company’s water demands have lowered the water table, making it difficult for them to grow crops. 

Mexican law states that all commercial interests that wish to operate on communal land must reach an agreement with the ejidatarios resident to the land. In 2012 the Aquila ejidatarios and Ternium signed a contract stating that in exchange for permission to operate a mine on ejido land, Ternium would pay the ejidatarios a fee of USD 3.80 per ton of iron ore extracted. In 2017 the contract was renegotiated: the fee remained the same, but added to the deal were a reforestation campaign, a designated site for disposal of hazardous materials, and the construction of two pedestrian bridges and a hospital (the town’s sole clinic was exclusively for the use of Ternium employees and their families — all medical care beyond the ability of a general practitioner had to be seen to out of town), all to be funded by Ternium. 

Ternium simply did not keep up their end of the bargain. According to members of the community, the USD 3.80 Ternium agreed to pay became MXN 3.80 — only USD 0.19 at the time of writing. No hospital was constructed, and neither were the promised pedestrian bridges.The land appointed for waste disposal was instead mined for iron ore. From 2012–2023, the Aquila Mine expanded from 73 hectares (180 acres) to 380 hectares (939 acres) and the company began to extract gold, silver and copper, all without community approval or a renegotiation of the standing contract. Fighting back proved a deadly business: in 14 years 38 community leaders have been killed in Aquila and the surrounding countryside. 

Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca helped the ejidatarios petition the courts to allow the community to elect their own leader, as the ejidatarios considered the then-current community leaders to be in the pocket of Ternium. The community also sought the payment of millions of pesos in back rent that had been placed in escrow, but not given to the community. Ternium fought the community every step of the way, but in 2022 it seemed that the legal process would favor the community over the mine. At this time, the threats began. The two men were stalked by local gangsters. More than once Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca were chased by masked men on motorcycles, but managed to outrun their pursuers in their Honda pickup truck. 

On December 13, 2022, Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca attended a community assembly meeting in Aquila, where they, along with hundreds of the town’s residents, threatened to block the mine’s operations if Ternium did not respect the agreements signed in 2012 and 2017. Also present were three members of the directorate for the Aquila Mine: Mining Development Director Diego Ferrari, HR manager Rogelio Omaña Romero and Community Relations Director José Ulises González. Also present was the town mayor, José María Valencia Guillén. 

When the two lawyers told the Ternium representatives that the community was ready to shut down the mine in protest, the directors responded with a threat of their own. According to three eyewitnesses present at the assembly, Omaña Romero told Díaz and Lagunes to “let go” of their fight with the mine, and if they didn’t, “they would be killed at any moment.” Díaz Valencia replied that Omaña Romero had given him a death threat, and made sure the government official present to mediate the assembly registered it as such. Said one of the eyewitnesses: “The engineer Ferrari threw the microphone, they [the three men representing the mine] got up, and they left.” One month later Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca had disappeared. 

In the subsequent trial investigating the disappearances, Javier Puntos testified to being present at and participating in the kidnapping of Díaz Valencia and Lagunes Gasca. He said under oath that he, along with other local criminals, had received pictures of the two men and strict instructions not to let them escape. “Afterwords we found out they were killed because they were fucking things up for the mining company [Ternium].” Soon after testifying, Puntos was also murdered, after being released from police custody without explanation. 

When asked for comment, Ternium reiterated their willingness to pursue “a good working relationship” with the ejidatarios of Aquila, and stated that all communities surrounding their operation should “submit their concerns in a constructive and transparent manner.” They also condemned “any type of violence against the community.” No employee of Ternium has been investigated or indicted in connection with the case. 

In September of 2023, the community of Aquila finally won their court case, which allowed them to elect their own leader to represent them in negotiations with the mine. An ex-employee of Ternium won the vote, and the rapacious extraction of fuel for the capitalist death machine continues — generating Ternium towering profits that cast a bloodsoaked shadow upon the town of Aquila, the people who live there, and the world. 

“El orgullo más grande que siento estar siempre al lado de mis compañeros, hermanos de raza, los indígenas…ofrendaré todo mi esfuerzo, mi trabajo y mi vida por defender nuestra raza.

The greatest pride I feel is to be forever by the side of my friends, my brothers, the indigenous…I will give all my strength, my work and my life to defend our people.”

— Antonio Díaz Valencia

When “Israelis” left Europe to settle Palestine in 1948, they brought European plants with them to remind them of “home” — the home they said did not accept them. Introducing non-native plant species was also a means to drive Palestinians out of their own homeland and towns and deny them access to water and land.

One tree the settlers favored was the eucalyptus tree, known in “Israel” as the “Jewish Tree” (despite being native to Australia) as it was so instrumental to the colonization of Palestine.

But first, what is settler-colonialism? Colonialism is the forceful arrival of settlers into a land that is already occupied to enable exploitation benefiting these settlers’ state back home. The settler part, however, presupposes that a native population, which becomes Indigenous when it exists in relation to settlers, is being displaced permanently so that settlers can occupy their homeland for themselves. Settler-colonialism creates new countries where none existed, and usually ends up carving out a state of their own instead of staying beholden to the state that sent them in the colonies — an example being pre-independence British Colonies and post-independence United States of America.

The importation of these foreign plant species into Palestine firstly played a part in concealing the Nakba. After 1948, zionist organizations planted more than 250 million trees in Palestine, most of which were invasive pines and eucalyptus. These trees were planted around the ruins of Palestinian villages that were ethnically cleansed and emptied during the Nakba. Under the guise of “turning the desert green”, land around ancestral Palestinian communities was seeded with these foreign plant species and then expropriated to be turned into a ‘natural reserve’ that is neither natural nor a reserve of anything. Legally, it means the land cannot be built on. It cannot be excavated. The Nakba is concealed.

When objections are raised about this practice, settlers —  who think of everything in terms of their potential for exploitation — is “well, at least we’re doing something with the land!” but Palestinians were doing something with the land too. Just because the settlers didn’t understand this relationship doesn’t mean that the land was not being used in some way.

It’s difficult in the West to understand ties to the land. We are removed from the processes of production, and see commodities only as the object in front of us on the grocery store shelf. We don’t see the labor that went into bringing us vegetables on a stall or candy in the aisles. Someone has to till the land, someone has to plant the seeds, someone has to water the sprouts, and someone has to harvest, package, and drive the grown crops to the store so we can eat them.

Thus, we think of land in the abstract. We think that the shelves will always bear food, because from our perspective it just appears there, conjured out of thin air. But for most of human history (and for a vast portion of the world still today) this has not been the case. It was instantly clear to any farmer of the past, including in Europe, that land had to be taken care of lest it stopped providing for good.

Before the Nakba, Palestinians distributed land communally under the Masha’a system. Plots were distributed among families for a certain period, and land outside villages was held in common for grazing and collecting firewood.

Many ways in which Palestinians made use of the desert and marshes and why they chose to leave them as they did may have very well been lost in the Nakba. Most of the information about the Masha’a practice in Western studies comes from British sources and is thus seen through their worldview. After which, the absence of evidence about how people used to survive on their native land is used by the settler to justify more of their destructive practices.

A system that works for its population cannot be said to be a failed system. That settlers “made the desert green” is a childish myth for a childish people who mythologize their history where none has been. Throughout history, Palestine had long been a provider of commodities around the Mediterranean. Even today, the only use “Israelis” have for the Naqab desert is to abandon asylum seekers there to die. No settler wants to live in the desert — they prefer the lush, neatly-colonized landscapes west of the Jordan, or the seaside accommodations that Gaza keeps away from them. What one finds in the Naqab today are 36 unrecognized Palestinian villages that do not appear on any map (including Google Maps), and several kibbutz suspiciously close to the border with Jordan; this makes sense within “Israeli” settler-colonial policy, as the kibbutz were established to serve as the first line of human shields against incursions (and that is indeed the purpose they served on October 7, 2023).

The introduction of destructive species in Palestine has disrupted local ecosystems and the availability of water. Eucalyptus trees drink up as much water as is made available to them, which can be used to justify not providing water to Palestinian communities – and eventually forces Palestinians to abandon their homes. Eucalyptus trees have also been the cause of many wildfires in Palestine — the oil in the bark is highly flammable and makes the trees explode under heat, spreading the fire. Wildfires in Palestine are now more common than they used to be, and this can be directly attributed to the presence of foreign plants that have been imported to Palestine.

Since 1967, settlers in Palestine have uprooted over 800,000 olive trees — trees which are suited to the local climate and provide food and livelihood to millions of Palestinians. Settlers are not interested in cultivating olives for themselves; they prefer to destroy these generational trees and import olive oil from Turkey or Spain; Because of this, the “Israeli” settler state has become the 35th largest importer of olive oil in the world. The settler state turns itself into a caricature because no concessions can be given — not one step back can be made.

The ramifications of this form of colonialism are plenty. Under humanitarian concerns, the settler reinforces their power and ensures the native population will never be a problem for them. They kill the Indigenous; they force them into reservations; they sever their ties to the land that feeds us all, and then wonder why climate catastrophes happen. And when these catastrophes happen, the settler retort is to say “well, there’s just nothing we could have done to prevent this!” To say otherwise would mean recognizing that the land is occupied and that people did know what to do for hundreds of years, but they were uprooted and severed from the land — only then will the settler know peace, however briefly. To recognize and integrate Indigenous practices would mean to recognize their claim to ownership of the land – at least partly – and this is antithetical to the survival of any settler state.

Despite being removed from its process of production, land is land: it feeds us. We extract its resources for our devices. This is true whether one is Palestinian, European, American, or anyone else.

In 1626, when Puritans arrived in what is now Salem, located off the Bay of Massachusetts, they came across empty buildings and, thinking they were abandoned, appropriated them. By winter, when the Naumkeag band of the Massachusett came back to their winter fishing grounds for the season, they found white people occupying their homes, redecorating them to suit their European tastes. Instead of driving them out, the Naumkeag welcomed these newcomers as people needing help in a new land they did not know. They taught the English how to cultivate the land, how to plant in the hills productively, and how to survive there.

In Salem the settlers drained swamps and built upon them houses and industry, despite the fact that the Naumkeag had been living perfectly well with these swamps next to their fishing grounds for thousands of years. They understood the importance of these biomes because they had lived with them for millennia. In Salem too the rocky hills in Salem were also a problem to the settlers — just another obstacle to be flattened, destroyed and paved over.

When Europeans came to Turtle Island, they thought they were seeing wilderness; huge forests and marshes greeted them. But what they were actually seeing were carefully-tended autonomous systems that served as breadbaskets for the Indigenous population. Controlled burns were used seasonally to renew the soil, promote the growth of fire-adapted plants and prevent wild forest fires. Over generations, these burns could be massive and span over hundreds of miles — but they were not random. They were the result of careful planning over decades.

As fires destroy entire towns in California right now, we may want to remember that Native American burns across Arizona and New Mexico showed that it is possible to break the typical climate-fire pattern across large areas. This pattern consists of a few years of rainfall promoting plant growth followed by a year of drought that starts wildfires. It becomes even more mind-boggling to witness these fires and wonder how much must have gone wrong that things have come to this when Indigenous people would be able to enact these practices today in California, but are kept away from doing so at the administrative level.

Native tribes actively managed and enriched forests by introducing beneficial species and useful plants for human life that could thrive in a given system. Plants were sustainably harvested and encouraged to become resilient by sometimes purposely — but always strategically — disturbing the ecosystem.

This was not wilderness and neither was it unique to the Americas. This was not undeveloped land. It looked undeveloped to the European eye because they did not see cobble roads or brick houses, but it sustained life for millions of people for millennia. The European considered the Natives’ tie to the land magical, as if they had some secret sixth sense and knew just where to find berries and game, because they could not see the approach taken to building a multi-generational system with reason and labor.

Dams along the Klamath river were removed just three months ago to restore salmon populations, and now enlightened descendants of Europeans are blaming the Indigenous populations that led this initiative for dispersing water that could have been used against the fires. But salmon indirectly help forests become resilient against wildfires, and this is what the settler mind refuses to see.

The Naumkeag band used the Salem grounds as their seasonal fishing spot. How did all the fish happen to congregate there specifically?

And European settlers could have enjoyed this way of life too — the Naumkeag and many other tribes did not pick up weapons against them, even as the settlers killed them off with diseases they brought over from Europe, but instead welcomed them into their homes and communities, teaching them what they knew of the land. Instead, settlers chose to create reservations outside of the nations’ ancestral homelands through 535 treaties that the U. S. government broke with the Indigenous at every turn.

In California, forest fires are a natural risk. The climate is naturally prone to wildfires, and certainly climate change is worsening the situation. But the European response to these constant risks is always to consume more. Build more dams to dump more water on more fires. Then build more walls to retain more water when the dams flood. Build more dykes to help the walls we built…

Indigenous practices are not magical or mystical. They are the result of understanding the local conditions (something we all do as humans) through practice over millennia. What seems more magical is expecting that we would be able to transpose foreign practices to entirely different conditions with no friction.

I can tell you one thing: if the land in California had been under Native stewardship, the fires would not be destroying thousands of acres, countless homes, and causing the suffering we are all witnessing at this moment.