Barro Blanco petition almost at target signatures

Some household issues: Our website has suffered some serious mishap towards the end of last year. First we moved away from GoDaddy as our hosting provider, because of their support for – and then their flip-flopping about – draconian copyright protection law proposals. Furthermore, they have a take-down policy that allows just about anyone to have your website taken offline by them based on even the flimsiest copyright claims, which is a phenomenon that is unfortunately becoming all too common in the US. So, we’re now hosted by Servage.net, on servers in Germany. If ever the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative comes in effect, we’ll move there.

But that wasn’t the end of our troubles. One way or the other, some malicious script managed to insert malicious code into our php pages almost every night – a major pain in the butt to clean up and the cause wasn’t clear. We finally decided to re-install and rebuild the website from scratch, which seems to have solved the issue, at least so far.

That, in turn, resulted in messages not reaching our newsroom! This entire introduction, dear reader, serves to explain why we haven’t reported earlier on a noble initiative by Mrs. Cathy White; an online petition to stop the construction of the hydroelectric dam Barro Blanco, in the Tabasare river on the border of the Ngobe Bugle comarca.

That project, of which our president Ricardo Martinelli is reportedly a shareholder, is an insult to anyone with any understanding of environmental issues and human rights, and a disaster for the people who actually live in the area. I know, because I went there to investigate for a radio documentary.

The petition has a stated goal of 28,000 signatures, and it stands now at 27,419. That’s just a small part of our daily page views here on this site, so if you read this, please go here and sign. And then ask your family and friends to sign too.

This dam should not be built. A petition alone isn’t gonna stop it, but it’ll show the “entrepreneurs” and financiers behind it – not in the least the Dutch government owned FMO bank – that there are enough people willing to stick their neck out to prevent this train wreck from happening. The courageous Ngobe people have already shown that their willing to do the heavy lifting required to end the robbery of their resources.