Under the guise of national security and economic growth, governments and corporations worldwide are escalating legal strategies to suppress Indigenous activists and organizers.
According to Mapuche activist Moira Millán, a dictatorship has returned to Argentina.
Moira Millán awoke to screams and shattered glass on 11 February 2025, as state police raided multiple Mapuche lofs, or communities, across the Argentinian Patagonia. Moira’s home of lof Pillan Mahuiza, a Mapuche community occupying state land for 25 years, was one of them.
‘They acted like they did during the worst times of the dictatorship. They stole books, smashed doors and windows, and caused great destruction. But the most serious issue is the safety of the people,’ Millán wrote in a blog post on 18 February.
According to Millán, police beat, handcuffed, and threw lof residents and elders to the ground, eventually detaining ally Victoria Dolores Fernández Núñez who lived in the lof. Police accused Núñez of ecoterrorism for arson that set off a wildfire weeks prior and damaged swaths of forest and the equipment of a large ranching company.
Millán knows the true reason for increased repression of the Mapuche: President Javier Milei’s administration is keen on removing the territory’s protectors so they can then exploit it. The Corcovado River, which runs through the lof, could be a future site for fracking.
President Javier Milei’s administration is keen on removing the territory’s protectors so they can then exploit it. The Corcovado River, which runs through the lof, could be a future site for fracking.
‘[The state] has this perverse idea that the river should supply their companies,’ Millán said. ‘When we tell people of the world that we must defend the life of the river, that we won’t continue killing our environment and rivers for this fictitious progress, they need to disqualify our authority as an ancestral Mapuche nation by accusing us of terrorism, using these lies that disqualify our fight.’
Worldwide, governments and corporations are escalating their legal strategies, under the guise of national security or economic growth, to suppress Indigenous-led environmental movements. Earlier this year, Milei gifted billionaire and outgoing U.S. Department of Government Efficiency chair Elon Musk a chainsaw to symbolize Musk’s efforts to slash government departments, a far-right-wing strategy aimed at privatizing public sectors and rolling back civil rights to help prevent opposition.
Worldwide, governments and corporations are escalating their legal strategies, under the guise of national security or economic growth, to suppress Indigenous-led environmental movements.
In the United States, two-spirit Navajo (Diné) activist Siihasin Hope has defended land and water alongside Indigenous sovereignty for nearly a decade. Hope was arrested and charged multiple times during frontline protests against the Line 3 pipeline on Indigenous Anishinaabe reserves and treaty lands in northeastern Minnesota. Upon returning home, they told Prism that they learned they were on a domestic terrorism watchlist for organizing with ‘extremist groups’.
‘It’s been a really surreal experience because I’m literally telling people we need to take care of the land like we take care of ourselves,’ Hope said. ‘No to extraction, no to profit over people, you know, and some of those pacified ways of saying protect Mother Earth and defend the land and protect the water.’
While the Milei and Trump administrations swap strategies to freeze environmental and social justice movements, organizers aren’t backing down. In fact, they’re leaning harder into their fights and building international solidarity along the way.
Criminalizing resistance
The 2016 protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline were part of one of the largest environmental movements of the 21st century, in which thousands of people took direct action against Energy Transfer’s oil pipeline through unceded treaty lands near Standing Rock Indian Reservation.
According to Greenpeace USA’s senior legal adviser, Deepa Padmanabha, when police violence escalated on the frontline of the protests, the US entity of the international nonprofit Greenpeace financially supported five Indigenous trainers from a group called Indigenous People’s Power Project to travel to Standing Rock and conduct trainings in de-escalating violence at the request of Indigenous leadership.
But in 2017, Energy Transfer sued three Greenpeace entities in federal court, alleging defamation and violations of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), claiming they orchestrated all frontline activity. When the case was dismissed, Energy Transfer refiled a similar case in North Dakota state court and eventually won at trial, where Greenpeace was ordered to pay $660 million. Greenpeace is currently arguing that the court should reduce the jury verdict.
‘If you have individuals across sectors working together in their resistance, corporations are not going to be able to withstand that kind of movement, so they’re resorting to really desperate measures to fight back,’ Padmanabha said.
The case is a classic example of a Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation (SLAPP), a legal tactic used to intimidate and silence activists. Though filed against Greenpeace, as part of the lawsuit, Indigenous allies were subpoenaed and forced to turn over internal documents and sit for deposition.
‘This signal was to anybody and everybody watching that you could be next,’ Padmanabha said. ‘Even if you’re not a named defendant, there are other ways that these corporations bring in frontline environmental defenders. That’s why it’s so critical that these tactics backfire, that we actually show them that by going after us, you’re actually making us stronger.’
A spike in anti-protest legislation since 2017 has led to increased criminal penalties, including felony charges and steep fines. According to Padmanabha, an organization of conservative legislators and private sector representatives is behind most of these laws. Known as the American Legislative Exchange Council, the group drafts model legislation for governments, including the Critical Infrastructure Protection Act that criminalizes grassroots protests against oil and gas projects in 24 states.
Organizer Max Wilbert saw firsthand what this criminalization looks like in practice. In 2021, while co-writing his book Bright Green Lies about the greenwashing of renewable energy sources, he learned the US’s first lithium mine was planned for Thacker Pass, Nevada. Considered a critical mineral, lithium from the mine will be used in electric car batteries for General Motors.
In an effort to combat the mine, Wilbert camped out in protest and worked with a coalition of tribes for whom Thacker Pass is a sacred site of cultural significance. Efforts were made to legally challenge the mine in court, but Thacker Pass lies under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the agency within the Department of the Interior responsible for administering U.S. federal lands. Corporations like Lithium Nevada also have exploitation rights to all federal land under the Mining Law of 1872.
‘The laws are set up to prioritize mining above everything else,’ Wilbert said. ‘It’s legal to destroy Native American sacred sites for mines and pollute groundwater, if you have the proper permits.’
By the spring of 2023, organizers pivoted back to physical protests through the Ox Sam Camp, an Indigenous-led prayer camp that became the base for the resistance against the largest open-pit lithium mine in North America. According to Wilbert, throughout the two years of on-and-off protest camps, BLM sent undercover agents to community events, surveilled the camp with cameras and binoculars, and sent cease and desist letters to protesters. After partaking in various construction blockades, Wilbert and five other protesters were charged in 2023 with civil conspiracy, trespassing, and tortious interference.
‘The problem is bigger than just criminalizing resistance. … It’s a complete inversion of justice, a twisting of what’s right and wrong, and enshrining both of those in the legal system,’ Wilbert said.
‘It’s very isolating to be heavily surveilled‘
Advancements in technology allow for law enforcement, corporations, and government agencies to better surveil protestors using geofencing, social media monitoring, and gait recognition technology that analyzes the shape of a person’s body and the unique way it moves in order to identify them. Hope told Prism that when they returned from Line 3 in 2021, surveillance became part of daily life.
At public speaking events, the police presence suddenly increased when they took the stage. Cops recognized them at traffic stops. FBI agents went to their grandmother’s home to ask who lived on the property. Whenever Hope was arrested at protests, they were placed in solitary confinement.
In the years since, they’ve watched the escalation in surveillance and violence against pro-Palestine protests under the Biden and Trump administrations, much of which officials justify with rhetoric claiming they are suppressing “terrorist” groups.
‘Palestinian elders who’ve been a part of my life are afraid to have linkage with me because of my association with the watchlist,’ Hope said. ‘It’s very isolating to be heavily surveilled. I remember when I was arrested at the Palestinian encampment last year, one of the [state] officers who arrested me told me, “I’ve been following this person for seven years, and we finally got them.”‘
Hope is moving back to their grandmother’s homeland in Black Mesa, Arizona, land that since 1974 has been legally defined as Hopi territory. While the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act displaced thousands of Navajo for the creation of a coal mine, several hundred Navajo families remain. Earlier this year, the Navajo Nation’s president, Buu Nygren, announced that Native land is once again available for coal mining. Still, Hope remains determined to return to Black Mesa.
When the Argentine military dictatorship seized control in 1976, President Jorge Rafael Videla spent seven years slashing workers’ rights, displacing Mapuche communities, expanding extractive frontiers, and disappearing dissenters.
‘I think a lot about Palestine in particular, and understanding justice for my people in a similar lens—of not just Land Back, but a right of return,’ Hope said. ‘What’s going to happen to all of the elders out there now that coal is going to start back up again? This is the call for people, anybody who has a relationship with Black Mesa, with family, to consider going home.’
The surveillance and criminalization of protesters like what is happening in the US is not a new phenomenon. When the Argentine military dictatorship seized control in 1976, President Jorge Rafael Videla spent seven years slashing workers’ rights, displacing Mapuche communities, expanding extractive frontiers, and disappearing dissenters.
In modern-day Argentina, Millán said it feels like history is repeating itself as she witnesses Milei’s rollback of Indigenous rights under the pretence of an economic emergency to justify resource extraction from the Corcovado River.
‘We talk about the system of Pu Newen, spiritual forces of nature that generate a circular necessity of life,’ Millán said. ‘We don’t agree that life should be commodified or objectified. Therefore, when you exploit resources, it’s not just a physical, concrete aggression, but also part of the cultural imposition that eliminates our voice, our understanding.’
In modern-day Argentina, Millán said it feels like history is repeating itself as she witnesses Milei’s rollback of Indigenous rights under the pretence of an economic emergency to justify resource extraction from the Corcovado River.
As an activist who advocates and works toward the recuperation of ancestral Indigenous lands, Millán now faces her own provincial ecoterrorism lawsuit, which is similar to a SLAPP. While the case has no proof, she has still been forced to pay thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer.
‘The state continues to pursue us, but they’re the ones who are ecoterrorists. The state has always been against the life and nature of Indigenous people,’ said Millán, asserting that the state is intensifying what she calls “terricidio,” or terricide: the destruction of the Earth.
The day after the February 11 raid, the governor of the local province, Nacho Torres, announced he would evict Mapuche lofs. He posted a video to his public Instagram, marketing the raid and Núñez’s arrest as a victory for the Argentinian people.
Núñez’s court battle wages on and she has not yet been fully acquitted, but she was able to return to lof Pillan Mahuiza on 13 May 2025. Meanwhile, Millán has pledged to continue fighting for the freedom of Núñez and the land itself.
‘Spiritual forces live in the river. That’s why we have to defend the river, because life is organized starting from the river — the Leufü,’ Millán said. ‘The Leufü is not only a water source, but also a space of our ancestors’ memory, of healing and medicine, of sharing voices of other peoples.’
When organizing, Padmanabha recommends learning how to create links across movements and to use guides such as Protect The Protest, created by a coalition to help protesters navigate the law and, more specifically, SLAPP lawsuits.
‘If you do have a police encounter, there are magical words: “I do not consent.” We have to make sure those on the front lines have that knowledge,’ Padmanabha said. ‘You have rights; exercise them. It is a scary time to do that, but it is so critical because we are bigger in numbers.’
When Hope was faced with Line 3 charges, in order to remain in solidarity with their co-defendants, they refused to take a plea. Nowadays, Hope wants to continue meeting revolutionaries worldwide to build robust liberation struggles. They’ve found kinship through organizing and ceremony in Cuba, Palestine, Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru.
‘Native people in the US and in Canada have a lot to learn from our relatives in the Global South. They’ve been organizing under outright authoritarianism and extreme fascism,’ Hope said. ‘Because of how far along we are in the settler colonial project, we have no choice as Indigenous people but to learn how to organize with other people who are oppressed alongside us.’
In South America, Millán continues calling for international support as she leans into her vision of transnational Indigenous sovereignty, sourcing courage from the spirituality of her ancestral territory.
‘To stop this wound that is killing the planet implies recovering our way of thinking about life with courage,’ Millán said. ‘We have to continue without fear. What gives me strength is certainty that the path we are walking is correct. It’s how life regenerates in the territory, how the spirit is heard, how the land takes care of us.’
Prism Editorial Team:
Tina Vasquez, Lead Editor
Carolyn Copeland, Top Editor
Stephanie Harris, Copy Editor
