5 takeaways from our investigation into the ‘ghost’ tribe that got millions in climate funding — SkimNews
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- Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe of Texas has raised more than $5 million for climate-related efforts since 2019 despite holding neither federal nor state recognition, with its shoestring annual revenue under $50,000 ballooning after Mancias' 2017 campaign.
- Juan Mancias built an international climate profile after pressuring French banks to divest from South Texas oil and gas projects in 2017, attracting philanthropic money, legal help from environmental nonprofits, and sympathetic journalism.
- Mancias' primary historical evidence — an 1871 railroad report describing an 1801 massacre — cannot be located or authenticated, and Grist found multiple anachronisms that historians called 'improbable'; his documented Indigenous ancestry traces to Mexico in the late 1700s on his maternal line, not the paternal line his claim rests on.
- The tribe used philanthropic grants between 2022 and 2024 to buy four properties totaling nearly 23 acres along a proposed pipeline route in Cameron County, Texas, bypassing the arduous federal process that recognized nations must navigate and that can take decades even for a fraction of an acre.
- The Carrizo/Comecrudo Tribe and the Society of Native Nations hold accredited observer status at the United Nations Environment Assembly, with SNN also accredited at UNESCO, granting them access to submit resolution language and engage directly with U.S. government delegations including the Justice Department and Health and Human Services.
- Frankie Orona, executive director of SNN, co-chairs the Indigenous Peoples Major Group at UNEP — the body whose internal guidance calls for referring complaints about participants to its co-chairs, creating an unresolved conflict of interest UNEP told Grist it has no procedure to address.
Why it matters: Environmental nonprofits, journalists, and U.N. bodies have served as a 'shadow' recognition system that channels climate funding and institutional access to unverified Indigenous claimants, producing real short-term wins — like stymieing LNG expansion in South Texas — while skirting the decades-long process recognized tribes face to reacquire land, with the U.N. body that would adjudicate legitimacy complaints led by the same person whose group is accused.
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