Biography
Joseph Mahmoud Dibee is an environmentalist and an alleged member of the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front. He was arrested in Cuba in August 2018 in relation to acts of arson and economic sabotage against a horsemeat-packing facility, an old-growth timber company, and other operations harming animals and the environment. He “disappeared” in 2005 before a federal grand jury indicted Dibee and 12 others as part of Operation Backfire, an FBI investigation into animal and earth liberation groups.
He spent life in exile working as an environmental engineer on renewable energy projects before being arrested in Cuba in 2018. In spring of 2022, Joe pleaded guilty in two of those arsons, a slaughterhouse in central Oregon that butchered wild horses and sold the meat in Europe and a Bureau of Land Management horse corral in Northern California. After his arrest, Dibee spent 29 months in pre-trial custody, followed by home detention. During his time in custody, Dibee suffered a broken jaw from an assault by a white supremacist that has left him permanently disfigured and was the first to contract COVID-19 in Multnomah County’s Inverness Jail, his lawyer said. U.S. District Court Judge Ann Aiken sentenced Dibee to time served and 1,000 hours of community service.
Dibee works with The Native Conservancy Project, a community nonprofit, to help track kelp production yields in Indigenous ocean communities. Joseph Mahmoud Dibee was a member of the Eugene-based Earth Liberation Front cell known as The Family. Charged in the FBIs December 2005 Operation Backfire indictment, he fled the United States and lived as a fugitive for nearly thirteen years, traveling between Russia, Cuba, Mexico, and Central America. He was apprehended in August 2018 by Cuban authorities and turned over to U.S. agents. He pleaded guilty in 2022 to conspiracy and arson and was sentenced in 2022 to time served plus probation, accepting responsibility for the 1997 burning of the Cavel West horse-slaughtering plant in Redmond, Oregon.
