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Another Organizer Facing Attacks
Maria Gunnoe is a community organizer in the mountains of West Virginia for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC). Maria is a life-long resident of the coalfields. She organizes people who want to protect their communities. Her own home has been severely damaged by the nearby highly destructive consequences of mountaintop removal.
She has faced threats and intimidation from the employees of a company doing mountaintop removal. OVEC and other organization joined with local community members and successfully stopped a valley fill in dry branch hollow that the workers jobs depended on. A meeting of community people and potential witnesses was delayed and then prevented from happening by company employees, some drunk, blocking parking spaces, surrounding and threatening a 79 year old retired United Mine Worker member who opposed the mountaintop removal and valley fill. Not satisfied with intimidation, these goons then forced their way into the building taking the chairs inside the meeting room and filled the parking lot prohibiting OVEC members and supporters from coming to this meeting. The meeting was forced to be held on a dead-end road.
After testifying despite the threats and successfully stopping a nearby valley fill the threats against Maria and her family have continued in many forms: "(An employee of the company) said to a friend that ‘it was odd sometimes how houses just catch on fire and people died in them.’" Phone calls, drive by shouts, men walking near their house at night, and continuous harassment continue to be aimed at Gunnoe and her family. Now one of the workers has filed bogus battery charges against Maria to further harass and intimidate her. Guards now protect this organizer's home while she and her family try to go on with daily life.
Gunnoe is a 2006 recipient of the Joe Calloway Award for Civic Courage created by the Washington DC-based Shafeek Nader Trust for The Community; World Rainforest Award 2007 Recipient; David vs Goliath Award, Rainforest Action Network.
No organizer should face such threats alone. We join with the West Virginia organizations that stand behind Maria Gunnoe. Go to http://www.myspace.com/ohvec or go to www.ohvec.org for more details about mountaintop removal. Send letters, post cards or donations to: Maria Gunnoe
PO BOX 46
Bob White, WV 25028 or you can send a donation to OVEC in honor of Maria Gunnoe’s work at PO 6753, Huntington, WV 25773-6753
(information supplied by OVEC)
All content © 2008 National Organizers Alliance, 2307 Martin Luther King Jr Ave SE, Washington, DC 20020; 202-543-6603
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