Over the past two years, Mexican scientists involved in bio- and nanotechnology have become targets. Theyre not threatened by the nations drug cartels. Theyre marked for death by a group of bomb-building eco-terrorists with the professed goal of destroying human civilization.
The group, which goes by the name Individualidades Tendiendo a lo Salvaje (ITS), posted its manifesto to anarchist blog Liberacion Totallast month. The manifesto takes credit for a failed bombing attempt that month against a researcher at the Biotechnology Institute at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. And the group promises more.
We have said it before, we act without any compassion in the feral defense of Wild Nature, the manifesto states. Did those who modify and destroy the Earth think their actions wouldnt have repercussions? That they wouldnt pay a price? If they thought so, they are mistaken. The group threatens more bombings against Mexican scientists because they must pay for what they are doing to the Earth.
A violent fringe group with anarcho-primitivist views its name roughly translates to Individuals Tending to Savagery, although Tending to the Wild might be more exact ITS sees technology and civilization as essentially doomed and leading humanity to an ecological catastrophe. Technology should be destroyed; humans should revert to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle; and all of this, ITS says, is for our own good. Nanotechnology is a particular scourge: Self-replicating nanobots will one day escape from laboratories to consume the Earth; and weaponization of nanotech is inevitable.
The group first attracted attention in August 2011, when a package bomb mailed to the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education in Mexico City exploded, seriously injuring a robotics researcher and bursting the eardrum of a computer scientist. An earlier version of ITSs manifesto was found charred among the debris. Police have yet to make arrests in the case.
Late last month, ITS claimed responsibility for the 2011 shooting death of a biotechnology researcher, also of the National Autonomous University, boasting that Ernesto Mendez Salinas murder was the groups first fatality. But there are reasons to doubt the claim. ITS is lateto claim responsibility, and police believe the murder occurred during an attempted carjacking unrelated to the group. But at the very least, ITS wants to send the message that its willing to kill for its agenda.
ITS is nowhere near as deadly as the narco-terrorism that has plagued Mexico for years. Its claiming responsibility for seven bomb attempts that have injured three people and killed no one. Its also suspected of mailing two unclaimed bombs that exploded during shipping in the same period, injuring a total of four people. The most recent bomb exploded on Feb. 21 inside a mailbox, injuring a maintenance worker.
If all this sounds like an updated, Mexican version of the Unabomber, it should. According to Roger Griffin, a political scientist at Oxford Brookes University and author ofTerrorists Creed, the manifestos language has very strong parallels to the anti-technology pamphletIndustrial Society and Its Future byTed Kaczynski.
Kaczynski became persuaded that the technocracy was destroying the world, Griffin tells Danger Room. He became a radical ecologist, he lived in the wild, he lived in a hut, he read people like [technology critic] Jacques Ellul, and anarchists, and a whole load of stuff. And against the background of the 1960s hippie rediscovery of the mystic relationship with the environment, he developed a lone wolf version of ITS.
Two intersecting trends appear to account for the new wave of attacks on Mexican scientists: booming research in nanotechnology, and spillover violence from the drug wars.Along with other Latin American countries that have invested in the field Brazil and Argentina, in particular Mexico views nanotechnology as a pathway to a more powerful research and industrial base,Natures Leigh Phillipswrote in August. According to Nature, the boom coincided with the spread of a violent eco-anarchist philosophy among some radical groups.
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In Manifesto, Mexican Eco-Terrorists Declare War on Nanotechnology