The maintenance and operation of Cancún’s luxury hotels and massive corporations is the work of Mexican proletarians. The living conditions of many of these workers—like their counterparts the world over—are lamentable, especially given the contrast of the concentration of wealth exhibited in their places of work. The lot of hotel workers in Cancún calls to mind Marx’s comments on capital accumulation: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is therefore at the same time the accumulation of misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, [and] mental degradation at the other pole.”[19] Whether or not Cancún’s proletarians will rise up in defiance, as famously predicted by Marx, is an open question. The seeming lack of participation on the part of locals in mobilizations, discussions, and other events against COP16 proved to be disconcerting, notwithstanding the organizational efforts taken up by various climate activists against this trend.
The master of ceremonies at COP16 was Mexican president Felipe Calderón Hinojosa, from the far-right National Action Party. At one point during COP’s two weeks, Calderón was seen literally dressed in green; his major proposal as presented in Cancún was to mandate that the Mexican federal government phase out incandescent bulbs within the country over the next three years.[20] This decidedly minimalist move—one, it should be said, in keeping with the more general trend among the world’s states in light of the climate crisis—also was reflected in Calderón’s inauguration of a lone wind-energy plant near Cancún on the eve of the summit; the Villa Climática, a space located next to a McDonald’s south of the city in which the federal government held exhibits sponsored by Coca-Cola that purportedly examined climate change and hosted a “cultural exhibition” where Nextel, Symantec, Oracle, and other telecommunications corporations were afforded space. The Villa Climática was catered by, among others, Domino’s and Señor Frog’s; it also featured a section dedicated to the commemoration of Mexico’s bicentennial of formal independence, bearing the title “200 Years of Being Proudly Mexican.” No similar space could be found in memory of the Mexican Revolution, the centennial of which was also celebrated in 2010.
COP16 featured a heavy Mexican military and police presence too. One estimate claims there were six thousand units in total at the beginning of the talks.[21] Military patrols in Hummers with machine guns trained on crowds of Cancunenses and outsiders alike were regular events, as was movement by police trucks carrying masked officers with assault rifles. Local news reports in Cancún suggest that the Mexican government acquired a crowd-monitoring drone from the Israeli military.[22] Police and military helicopters originating from the United States could be seen surveilling mobilizations.
In spite of the repressive powers projected in Cancún, though, resistance was also practiced. The international organization Via Campesina put together the Global Forum for Environmental and Social Justice in Cancún’s San Jacinto Canek Park to coincide with the second week of COP16. The forum brought six caravans of Mexicans from several regions of the country to report on the socioenvironmental situations experienced around the republic, at the end of a year that saw unprecedented rains and attendant flooding in much of southeastern Mexico—a reality for which climate change likely bears responsibility. Via Campesina also invited a number of journalists and other public intellectuals to speak on the climate and socioenvironmental crises, and helped organize a march of approximately three thousand people from central Cancún toward the site of the Moon Palace during COP’s second week. The forum was even addressed by Bolivian president Evo Morales, who spoke of the need for a “neosocialism” that incorporates a defense of ecology with class struggle and called for the third millennium to be a “people’s millennium,” one in which “oligarchy, hierarchy, and monarchy” are overcome as historical residues—however lacking his own leadership has been in these terms for Bolivia itself, particularly in light of the violence exercised by his police in September 2011 against indigenous protesters opposed to the construction of a highway through the highly biodiverse Isiboro Secure National Park.[23]
Apart from Via Campesina’s event, Klimaforum10, the successor to Klimaforum09, which at COP15 in Copenhagen released a rather sensible antisystemic analysis of the climate predicament, held an alternative summit on the site of a polo club near Puerto Morelos, a town south of Cancún. Polo players on horseback could be seen some distance from the Klimaforum campus. The summit’s site was mirrored in its mainstream politics, which in contrast to those of Klimaforum09, seemed to revolve around inadequate reforms and approaches stressing lifestyle changes to address the environmental crisis. This current was perhaps best symbolized by the talk given at Klimaforum10 by Polly Higgins, a former corporate lawyer from the United Kingdom who argued that what must be done in light of the climate and environmental crises is to codify the crime of ecocide into international law—as though capital respected such law in any sense.[24]
Against approaches that defend existing society through reforms were the perspectives and actions of the revolutionary association known as Anti-C@p in Cancún. An explicitly anticapitalist grouping, Anti-C@p was comprised of autonomous youths hailing largely from Mexico City and connected to Marea Creciente México (Rising Tide Mexico). Anti-C@p’s vegetable-oil-powered bus, which also had appeared at the Encounter for Autonomous Life in Oaxaca de Juárez eight months previously, was decorated with murals commemorating the life of Lee Kyung Hae, a Korean agriculturalist who committed suicide in protest of neoliberal capitalism during the World Trade Organization meetings in Cancún in 2003. While tied in ways to Via Campesina’s forum against COP, Anti-C@p carried out autonomous actions separate from it. One march organized without a permit by Anti-C@p in the streets of downtown Cancún saw scores of Mexican youths donning Zapatista-style masks and mobilizing with the goal of reaching the local branch of PROFEPA, the Mexican federal government’s environmental prosecution agency. Anti-C@p had also planned to disrupt a conference at which Calderón, World Bank president Robert Zoellick, and Walmart CEO Robson Walton were to speak—but it was prevented from doing so due to the police checkpoints erected between the city center and the zona hotelera. Indeed, in a spirit of internationalism, during the mobilization called for by Via Campesina during COP’s second week, the Anti-C@p bus carried a banner commemorating the two-year anniversary of the murder in Athens of fifteen-year-old Alexandros Grigoropoulos by police. At these and other demonstrations, Anti-C@p presented a spirit of passionate rage against the cruelties of constituted power and the system it upholds—“outbursts of anger in memory of the suffering of [humanity],” as Christos Filippidis characterizes the December 2008 riots in Greece.[25] Similar in this sense to their Greek comrades, and in marked contrast to the other critical currents to be found in Cancún, those associated with Anti-C@p also expressed a degree of sadness with regard to the state of the world. It is unclear whether this intermixing of passions can be considered an expression of the “hopeless sorrow” of which Hegel warns, but it was undoubtedly informed by what Arendt finds to be “the most powerful and perhaps the most devastating passion motivating revolutionaries”: “the passion of compassion.”[26]
Above all else, human-induced climate change constitutes a brutal assault on humanity and life itself—but with regard to the former, its effects are to be borne overwhelmingly by peoples of the Global South. The drought, famine, flooding, extreme weather events, increased susceptibility to disease, and sea-level rise that follow from climate change will affect human populations residing in southern societies far more severely than those who find themselves in the northern latitudes. While crop yields may well decline some 50 percent over the next ten years on much of the African continent and about 25 percent in Pakistan and Mexico by 2080, parts of Europe and North America stand to enjoy more favorable conditions for agriculture on average under moderate warming scenarios.[27] In the dry language of McGill doctoral candidate Jason Samson and company, global warming can be expected soon to cause “climate conditions currently associated with high population densities” to “shift towards climate conditions associated with low population densities,” in regions determined by Samson and his colleagues’ findings to suffer from high vulnerability to projected climate change: central South America, eastern and southern Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.[28] In their study of possible future drought scenarios, geographers Justin Sheffield and Eric Wood similarly find that southern Africa, West Africa, Central America, and the Tibetan plateau would be the regions worst affected by unchecked climate change.[29] Of the three hundred thousand annual