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Introduction: two staff members of Global Justice Ecology Project visited the region of Amador Hernández, Chiapas, in late March, as accredited journalists. They made this trip to document the impacts of emerging forest protection policies and carbon credit plans, including REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) and to draw the connections between these policies and any actual or potential abuses of human and community rights. The connections, if one seeks them out, are clear, and we will report on them in the coming weeks.

At the request of the community assembly of Amador Hernández, Global Justice Ecology Project is circulating the communiqué and sign-on letter, below. Both the communiqué and the letter were written by the community.

We hope you will respond by signing on to the action alert after the communiqué below, to ask that medical services and the human right to health be restored to this community, and that threats to their territorial sovereignty cease without delay.

Communiqué from Amador Hernández, Chiapas: (sign on letter follows)

We, the residents of the Amador Hernández region in Chiapas, which forms the core of the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve, well-known for its extraordinary biological richness, and is the site of historic resistance by indigenous peoples, denounce that the illegal threats by the bad government to expel us, culturally and physically, from our territories, have moved from words to deeds.