Texas Indigenous leaders target banks in fight against natural gas export terminals in Rio Grande Valley

Juan Mancias, chair of the Carrizo Comecrudo tribe, at the Eli Jackson Cemetery in San Juan on Feb. 11, 2019. Mancias and the tribe have fought plans to build natural gas export terminals on land they consider sacred at the mouth of the Rio Grande. (Credit: Marjorie Kamys Cotera for The Texas Tribune)

When Juan Mancias was a child, his grandmother told him the story her parents told her, of the place at the Great River’s end. All good things ended up there, she said, carried from the high deserts across 1,000 miles to the sea, where they spilled across a vast delta, teeming with life.

There, Mancias’ grandmother told him, the first woman was born from all the good things that washed down the river. And there, more than 60 years later, developers now want to build two export terminals, one priced at over $15 billion, to sell fracked Texas gas on international markets.