An interview with indigenous traditionalist and Animal Liberation Front activist Rod Coronado.

ROD CORONADO: A Voice for Liberation

The following is a transcript of a radio interview conducted by Mirha-Soleil Ross with Rod Coronado
on June 15, 2000 for ANIMAL VOICES (CIUT 89.5FM – Toronto). It was subsequently published in Issue #17 of the UNDERGROUND: The Magazine of the North American Animal Liberation Front Supporters Group.

Rod Coronado is an indigenous traditionalist, earth warrior and convicted ALF activist who spent 4 and a half years in a federal prison for actions carried out on behalf of the earth and the animals.

MIRHA-SOLEIL ROSS: Hi and welcome to Animal Voices. There are many people listening to the show who are familiar with you and your work but for new listeners, could you start by giving us a bit of an overview of your involvement with the Animal Liberation Front?

ROD CORONADO: Well, first I’d like to thank everybody, all of your listeners and yourselves for all the support that you gave me during that time while I was incarcerated. It definitely helped to know that I had support of people in the Toronto community, in Canada in general, and over the world really. It showed exactly how much support there is for illegal direct action as much as the government would lead us to believe otherwise.
To answer your question about how I first got involved with the ALF; what elevated me to that level of awareness and activism was pretty much just being raised always with a respect and reverence for animals and nature. It wasn’t a process I went through like first exhausting letter writing and petitioning, then protesting and demonstrations. I didn’t go through that progression simply because I was exposed to such an extreme level of animal cruelty and abuse and witnessing that via documentaries and through newsletters and magazines and newspapers, that for me the situation required immediate action. There was no time for those animals suffering in labs and fur farms and factory farms to wait to exhaust more legal means. I could see already that people for many, many years had chosen that path and although it is effective at times, it was not bringing about results quick enough for those animals now suffering. So I became involved in direct action with Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and Earth First! and eventually with the Animal Liberation Front.
And I became involved by being in Britain in the mid-eighties and seeing that the ALF was not a highly structured organization. You can just call yourself an ALF activist if you abide by three basic guidelines that respect life above property and if you commit yourself to rescuing animals from places of abuse and exposing the horrors of vivisection and animal abuse. That gives you the right to be an ALF activist. So when I saw people in England doing this without any lead, by pretty much just taking the direction themselves and being self-confident and empowered on their own to form their own ALF cells, then that’s what I did. I began what became a very effective ALF cell that into the eighties and nineties eventually elevated to raiding university laboratories and government research institutions.

MSR: Your focus seems to have been on fighting the fur industry. Why have you focused specifically on the fur industry?

RC: I’m a member of the Pascua Yaqui Nation and as an indigenous person, the fur trade represents so much more to me than just animal abuse. It represents cultural genocide. They were the foot soldiers of an invasion and conquest in the “new world.