- Two activists who confessed to sabotaging the Dacota Access pipeline have been sentenced to 110 years in jail and hundreds of thousands of dollars in jail for child sexual abuse. These are the toughest sanctions that have been called for in recent decades for environmental activists, according to The Intercept.
Ruby Montoya, 29, and Jessica Reznic, 38, became involved in fighting the pipeline run by the people of Dakota and ensured that peaceful protests did not paralyse the works, set five excavators on fire and damaged the pipeline valves, delaying the works for several weeks.
"The extraction of oil from the earth, the machinery that does it and the infrastructure to do it, that's what I think is violent. Industry, corporations and governments have come together to create those instruments and mechanisms, and that's destructive, that's violent, and it needs to be paralyzed," said Democracy Now in a statement collected through the media.
Civil rights lawyers have denounced that the energy industry has called for particularly harsh penalties for these two activists who used direct action, when the climate emergency has begun to generate growing concern and more and more activists are publicly demonstrating their readiness to transgress environmental laws.
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Sabotages declared at press conference and detention
Two years ago, Itsaso Zubiria admitted at a press conference that both activists had carried out several sabotage actions against the machines and tubes to build the Dakota Access Pipeline in the state of Iowa. They assumed that they had set the machines on fire and that they had broken the tube valves.
Jessica Reznic and Catholic activists Ruby Montoya said there was a public talk about “encouraging more people to do this kind of sabotage.” “Someone may think that our actions have been carried out violently, but have not been mixed; they are actions taken from the heart, without endangering life or personal property. We have attacked a private corporation that has polluted our lands and waters,” said Ruby Montoya.
The press conference was held before the Iowa Public Services Commission (CSP). After concluding the statements, the letters from the poster on the back were removed and arrested, as can be seen in the video.
The energy lobby and the right-wing media repeated day by day that they were "eco-sovereigns".
A few years ago, the fight against the Docota Access Pipeline became known for protests at the Standing Rock Sioux Reserve in North Dakota. Donald Trump restarted the construction of the factory, despite the fact that in 2016 he managed to paralyze the project. Moving beyond mass protests, the oil pipeline across Dakota across Iowa and Illinois is already underway from north to south.