A few decades back, Isaiah Berlin

Berlin applied this tale to the different minds of men. He noted that there are those, the Hedgehogs of human existence, who bury themselves in a fortress of fundamental belief, convinced of the surety of their one big idea, and the conviction that everything in the world must conform, or be made to conform, to that worldview. The Foxes of the intellectual world, on the other hand, don’t have “one big belief,” but they “know many things.” They are natural pragmatists who look to find solutions through observation, trial and error — and an understanding that nothing is ever going to be perfect. They know the world is far too complex to fit into any one idea, and try always to be on top of their game — understanding, most likely, that they stand a better chance of outliving, or out voting, the Hedgehogs of this world than changing their minds.

Berlin, expounding elsewhere on this theme, observed that the Twentieth Century was a “Century of Final Solutions.” A century of Hedgehogs, if you will. The inflection of the plural was poignant and purposeful, coming from a Russian Jew who lost many members of his extended family to both Hitler’s ovens and Stalin’s gulags. Whereas we all know that Nazism offered a Final Solution, and Hitler was clearly a Hedgehog, Berlin wanted us to reflect that it was only one expression of a certain type of linear, unitary and ahistorical thought which brooks no opposition to its fundamental truthfulness. To Berlin, Italian Fascism was as much a Final Solution as German Nazism, even without the sheer number of death camps. Market Fundamentalism was as much a final solution as Soviet Communism, even without the state forced labor. To Berlin, Christian Fundamentalism carried with it as much a final solution as did Radical Islam, even if the methods to achieve its ends were dramatically different. In his view, the Final Solution of Hitler wasn’t only the gas chambers and the mechanized murder of millions, it was the belief that the world should be something that it is not; and furthermore, by the application of force, that it can be made to take the imagined form. To Berlin the final solution of Nazism lived in the dogma that told a party member that he or she was justified and right to fulfill Nazi doctrine. To Berlin, all final solutions are formed in a mind that says “I am not cruel to do this; I am an agent of a higher righteousness, and it must be so. God, or the world, wants it to be so; I am just an angel of revealed truth.”

The same could be said of stalwarts of the Washington Consensus or the Soviet International. And it can be said of many supporters of the new law in Arizona, which demands that the police request to see the papers of anyone, if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that he or she might be in the United States illegally.

There has been much written in the past weeks about the new law in Arizona, and I was reluctant to take it on as a column for La Cuadra, as it has received so much attention elsewhere. But the need to do so crystallized while watching a video of California Republican Congressman Duncan Hunter, sounding every bit like a man who holds, deep in his Hedgehog heart, a “final solution” of sorts.

Hunter said, in reference to the issues around illegal immigration into America, “There can be no amnesty, that’s a given.” Further, he observed, “It’s not complicated, you just need the political will to [end illegal immigration] and we’re gathering that political will now and this Arizona law is a fantastic starting point.”

Then, when asked if he would support the deportation of children, born as legal citizens in the United States to parents that were undocumented, he declared, “I would have to say, yes.” Further noting that people might think, “You’re a mean guy. That’s a mean thing to do. That’s not a humanitarian thing to do,” Hunter defended himself by saying, “We’re not being mean, we’re just saying that it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.”

If you were in Guatemala on June 28th

And you should be still.

But what the hell happened – and, for that matter, what the hell is still happening down there? In general we’ve found the major media’s coverage of the events in Tegucigalpa a thin and unsatisfying gruel, flavored with a shake from the Cold War spice rack. In other words, it’s been pretty much standard operating procedure for the major Gringo news outlets.

As events surrounding the coup slip further out of control, that may begin to change – even the Old Grey Lady, Madame Sulzberger of the New York Times, can occasionally find her shame when it becomes clear that she’s providing cover for a butcher. Be that as it may, as Honduras staggers into a new election season next month, La Cuadra would like to offer an English language primer on the Honduran situation to our readers. In general our editorial voice is slurred (and our vision blurred) by a few bottles of good old-fashion lefty agitprop, but understanding the events currently underway in Honduras might just prove crucial to navigating the potentially devastating waters of our mutual political future. Only a few short decades ago coups and military juntas were de rigueur in Central America, but fell out of fashion as the mass graves were exhumed. And yet, the Honduran crisis highlights the tenuousness of the region’s democratic institutions and its resolution may well become the model for other nations in the not too distant future. That is a sobering prospect, particularly if the coup survives.

Said another way, while we generally support the leftward drift of Latin American politics over the past decade, we’d argue that even our friends on the Right would be fools not to worry about the dangers that the coming years will bring, as the global economy continues to melt, the tide of violence and the associated social ills of poverty and a narco-economy continue to rise, and the military might of potential coup plotters wait in the wings of sundry Latin American capitals. Honduras’ today could be Guatemala’s tomorrow – and if that happens, amongst other things, La Cuadra would have to pack up and move its tent further on down the road. We love it here, but our ability to publish our brand of journalism is predicated upon living in a democratic nation that respects freedom of the press. We assume that Honduras, at this point, would neither welcome nor support such bedrock freedoms.

Honduras needs to be understood in proper historical context. Like all nations between the Rio Grande and the Straits of Magellan, Honduras is now, and historically has been, a land of have-lots and have-diddlysquats. According to the United Nations Development Program, Honduras ranks number 115 out of 177 on a list of nations measured by the equality of wealth distribution. (Guatemala ranks 117.) The Institute for the Study of Labor and the World Bank estimate that nearly half of all Hondurans are “extremely poor,” with the ISL defining that as an income below what is necessary to provide a daily diet of 1200 calories per household member, and which the World Bank, defines by using the more standard measure of an income less than a dollar a day. Perennially, Haiti wins the prize for being the “most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere” but Honduras battles hard with Nicaragua and Jamaica for its place as Number 2. Forty-two percent of the Honduran population has no access to safe drinking water. Twenty-five percent are fully illiterate. Half of all agricultural workers own no land. Honduras has the highest rate of HIV infection in Central America. The Honduran Ministry of Health estimates that 75 percent of all children under the age of 5 are malnourished. Honduras’ most valuable export is its labor.

Concisely said, Honduras, for the majority of Hondurans ain’t a very jolly place. But for the wealthy few, it’s a pretty good ride. The political and economic elite of Honduras form a self-referential claque even more insular and self-protective than in Guatemala, and that’s a trick.

One of the most notable characteristics

I recently spent a week in Cuba on a research tour, organized through the Canadian organization, Cuba Education Tours, with a group made up primarily of Canadian and American attorneys, union members, and researchers. It was an extraordinary experience, dispelling much of what I thought I knew about Cuba, and ultimately revealing more about the US than I had anticipated.

Two prevailing American misconceptions about Cuba were dispelled very early in our trip. One is the notion that the island is a society “closed” to the outside world, a stubborn throwback to another ideological moment. But this is typical American myopia, conjuring a country frozen in 1959, when the popular uprising displaced the American playground that was pre-Revolutionary Cuba. To be sure, the US economic blockade has had, and continues to have, a huge impact on the island’s economy, reflected most dramatically in the poor housing stock and lack of industrial development, but Cuba is hardly isolated from the world. Today, Havana is crawling with Canadian, Mexican, European, African, and East Asian tourists, students, and businessmen, and even a fair share of American backpackers and adventurers stealthily defying the US State Department.

The other common, but more complicated, American misconception is that Cuban society is less “free” than American society. We Americans still like to think we live in the Free World, if not the center of it, despite our massive surveillance state, a prison system unparalleled in its size and ferocity, and our militarized borders and restrictive immigration policies. But Cubans, our government and media tell us, are forced to live under a repressive, colorless, and undemocratic police state. This characterization comes as a surprise to most Cubans, who have minimal interactions with police (far less visible in Havana than in, say, Guatemala City or New York), engage in a lively electoral process every 2-1/2 years, and who seem to be among the most engaging and politically astute people I have ever encountered.

In the days following President Obama’s limited overtures to Cuba after the OAS meeting in April, the Administration’s point person on Cuba policy was not the Secretary of State, but Obama’s Economic Advisor, Lawrence Summers. According to Summers, “Cuba’s known what it needs to do for a very long time and it’s up to them in terms of their policies, their democratization and all the steps they can take and we’ll have to see what happens down the road.” President Obama himself echoed this line, lecturing Cubans that “if you take significant steps toward democracy, beginning with the freeing of all political prisoners, we will take steps to begin normalizing relations.”

This is extraordinary stuff at a time when the US is enduring international rebukes over its publicly-admitted widespread use of torture and the detention of thousands of foreigners and even US citizens without due process of law. According to the oppositional Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation (CCDHRN), there are currently 232 “political prisoners” in Cuba, not an insignificant number, but slightly fewer than the number of “enemy combatants” currently held in Guantanamo Bay. How could it be that 232 alleged political prisoners – some of whom are leftist opponents of the Castro government and hardly pro-American– represent the political basis for American hostility to the Cuban Revolution?

These 232 political prisoners have about as much relevance to the US blockade of Cuba as Saddam Hussein’s non-existent “weapons of mass destruction” had to the decision to invade Iraq. The selection of Summers as a spokesman on US-Cuba policy, a man whose misogynistic and anti-democratic tendencies were on full display during his short tenure at Harvard, would be odd if the policy issues truly involved democratic freedoms. But of course, the real problem is not with the Cuban political system but with its economic system.

In Cuba, 85 percent of the population owns their own homes, mortgage-free. They have unrestricted access to high quality health care and a guarantee of a free public education through the university level. Teachers and community organizations have pivotal roles in determining educational priorities and curricula, ensuring the accessibility and relevance of the educational system. Every Cuban is guaranteed a basic income, and a job if they can work. One could go on about the percentage of female medical doctors (62 percent) or universal literacy (99.4 percent) or the number of incarcerated juveniles (zero), but in the US, such basic values have nothing to do with democracy or freedom. “Freedom” is reserved for markets and capital flow.

May Day 2009

My own trip to Cuba coincided with the 50th May Day celebration since the Cuban Revolution. For many Americans, the notion of International Workers Day might seem passé, a strange cousin to our own Labor Day celebrations of barbeque and the end of summer. Particularly in 2009, as American workers watch their hopes for long-term job security, health care, college educations, and a stable retirement dissolve in the face of economic meltdown, the notion of working class power feels highly theoretical.

Back in the late 1990s, when I was teaching in Brooklyn, NY, I had a student named Uran Dragon Kolenovic. And, it seemed that the dragon lived inside Uran’s head.

Uran Kolenovic was a 14-year-old immigrant from Kosovo whose mother and father had sent him to America to live with his grandmother when he was 9. He hadn’t spoken with his parents since. He and grandma lived in a horror of an apartment in Brooklyn’s Little Albania, and by all reports, which he later shared with me, it was a miserable existence. His grandmother hated him. Or resented him. Or resented having to feed him. Or having to look at him.

To express her feelings she refused to touch him, ever. Most of the time when I heard kids talk about problems at home I imagined some level of exaggeration. But with Uran, I felt in my gut that he was telling the Devil’s honest truth.

Uran was a damaged kid if ever I knew one. And I loved him.

In the first few weeks of class I didn’t much notice Uran, though he sat in the middle seat of the middle row. He was quiet and didn’t do much work, nor care too deeply about ancient civilizations. He seemed, at the time, like a very normal boy on my roster of 170 students each day.

Then, once, about 6 weeks into the term, while I was lecturing, I noticed Uran was methodically pounding his fist onto his desk and muttering something. I kept talking to the class and walked closer to his seat. What he was saying, and what he began saying, just a bit louder, as I got close to him was, “Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon…”

I stopped by his desk, while continuing to prattle on about the ancient Mesopotamians. Uran kept muttering and pounding his fist. After a minute I held my hand beneath his fist. He hit it in the same rhythm for some time while continuing to mutter, “Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon… Kill Mr. Tallon…” Then, after a few more beats, the pounding began to slow and eventually stopped altogether. Uran set his fist in my hand, while continuing to make the slow, striking motion but softer, more gently. Sometime around the development of cuneiform writing, I closed my hand around his fist, and with the rest of the world and its history oblivious, an intimacy and a friendship took root.

Some months later, when we were hanging out after school in my classroom, Uran told me about his grandmother and his parents and his living conditions. It was then that I realized that the day of the fist pounding was likely the first time in years that Uran had been touched by another human being.

How awful that must be. Can you imagine not having physical contact with another human being for years?

Fall and skin your knee. Alone. Ace a test. Alone. Breathe the polluted air of Brooklyn. Alone. Be afraid. Alone. Be a child. Alone.

Uran was a bit nuts, and he continued to have problems after that first contact, of course, but from that day he seemed marginally better. Much of this, I think, was because I did manage to introduce him to a few other boys in that class who also felt ostracized by the unforgiving and hierarchical culture of an American high school. “Group work might be worth something after all,” I remember thinking. Uran started hanging out with this clique after school and, for a while, seemed to smile more and mutter less.

When we were near the end of the semester, Uran’s best friend, Tommy, approached me after class. Tommy said he needed to talk to me after school. I told him to meet me after 9th period and didn’t think much of it for the rest of the workday. When he came in, with their other two friends, I asked where Uran was.

Tommy said he’d gone home, but that’s “kinda what we need to talk about.”

Then, being rather elliptical, Tommy, speaking for the other boys and himself, thanked me.

“For what, Tommy?”

“For helping us to find friends,” he said.

And I’ll always remember what he said next.

“You see, we all feel kinda like misfits.”

To which I responded, “Fitting-in in this fucking world is overrated, Tommy.”

I never met a small businessman yet who didn’t have one finger up his ass and the other on the scales. - Mad Dog Howard

Like many older married men, I’d rather have my fingernails pulled out with heated pliers than go with my wife to an allegedly cultural event, which in our still quite Southern town of Winchester, Virginia, usually means attending yet another local history or genealogy lecture. And I’d rather have the late Uday Hussein personally administer the ball shockers to me than attend one of our town’s many commercial events such as First Night, First Friday, or any “celebration of” (pick your own noun) such as Winchester’s spring festival of the apple blossom, downtown days, historic main street or any of the other thinly masked events which I call “Chamber of Commerce coordinated purchasing opportunities.”

But when my wife Barb pointed out, rather firmly I thought, that main street Winchester’s “First Friday” celebration was tonight, and given that I have not been outside this house for most of the month since returning from my shack in Central America, I knew that I’d better show a bit of enthusiasm.

And so I find myself standing here holding one of those ubiquitous caterer’s plastic wine goblets in the middle of a boutique whose theme or purpose, as near as I can tell, is cool looking weathered outdoor stuff brought indoors, then matched up with expensive new china and linens. Immediately, that high whine of hysteria in the back of my head starts its klaxon: Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere! Ooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeee… Get me the fuuuuuck outta heeeeeeeeeere!

I call it the “Dead Man Shopping” siren. Or “Rod Serling’s Lost Potpourri Zone.”

On the face of it, First Friday, which is “celebrated” in thousands of American downtowns on the first Friday in June each year, seems mainly an opportunity for merchants to give away wine and cheese and crab salad cracker spread in large amounts. Almost none of the attending crowd purchases anything. And when they do it seems to be one of those reflexive small token purchases one sees only in America: as in, “I am occupying space and breathing inside a retail establishment and the owner greeted me, so I must buy something.” Especially since I ate a piece of his cheese.

If First Friday is purely a cheese giveaway, they might do well to emulate our first populist president, Andrew Jackson, who let a 1,400 pound block of cheese age in the hallway of the White House for two years. Then in 1837 the President, on his way out of office, invited the public to come and eat it. It was gone in two hours. But the stench in the White House lasted well into the following presidency of Martin Van Buren, in much the same way our former president crapped upon the carpet of American history for Obama to clean up. Jackson knew he had caused the oncoming economic crash through over-extension of what we would now call sub-prime credit, leaving Van Buren to campaign on a platform of “Everybody gets a helluva lot less from here on out, so get used to it.” Not an enviable campaign position, to be sure. But at least Van Buren stood against the idea of allowing Texas to become a state, which, if he had been successful, might have saved us all much subsequent political grief.

Earth to Bageant: Snap out of it! Someone is talking to you.

And indeed someone is. A well dressed woman, one of our many Yankee transplants, stands nearby gabbing about why she chose a certain artificial condo development called “Creekside Village,” a development more or less embedded in a shopping center at the edge of town, as opposed to others as far as a mile from a mall. What more could a person ask for in life than to be within walking distance of Jos. A. Bank, and Ann Taylor? (Banning the local atmospheric release of the 328,000 pounds of toxins annually by two local factories would be nice. But hell, you cannot have everything in this life.)

Creekside is certainly the best looking of our developments and even has a few trees left standing. And it’s far from the crumbling old malls of the Seventies where immigrants and white trash shop. No Salvadorians or Guatemalans (who are rumored to keep chickens in wire cages under their kitchen sinks) out her way. Sure, it sits in the middle of a permanent traffic jam, but you can actually walk to the mall! Now to my Luddite mind the trick would be escaping FROM the mall, but these things are a matter of perspective.

I supposed there is still a creek at Creekside Village somewhere. One wandered along there when I was a kid, though I can see no sign today of what I would actually call a rippling creek in the dragonfly, tadpole and darting minnows sense of the word – although that open concrete storm drain alongside the pavement may well be it. Anyway, Mall Locked Village would have been too obviously accurate a name, so the pretense that a creek once filled with crawdads is still there was probably a better choice. I cannot help, though, but remember the old wetland where the red winged blackbirds perched on the cattails and sumac branches, piercing the muggy stillness of summer, issuing their crystalline cry before lifting off to nudge the sky with their bold red shoulders.

Cattle mutilations on Main Street

On our main street, Loudoun Street, there was once a J. C. Penney, Montgomery Ward, hardware stores and movie theaters. Its sidewalks were clogged with working class shoppers, especially on weekends when folks came into town from the outlying counties to buy shoes for the kids, groceries and perhaps a secret bottle at the liquor store. That was when J. J. Newberry’s and Woolworth were considered massive because they had six aisles. But with America’s main street retailers now left desanguinated – rather like those strange cattle mutilations in New Mexico – by the big box stores and suburban malls, the buildings on Loudoun Street are broken down into small boutique spaces selling “handcrafted” whatnots, small “galleries” of every sort imaginable, antiquish shops, the obligatory Starbucks knockoff, pub-like drinking establishments with dark paneling, and a few high end (for Winchester anyway) restaurants with iron tables and chairs under umbrellas out front. But on any given day the street is nearly empty, as if there has been a permanent bomb threat announced for the downtown area. Boutique business owners sit waiting to pounce on out of towners, mostly summer tourists visiting the surrounding Civil War battle fields. After Labor Day, they look for an advertising connection between Chinese made desk organizers and Thanksgiving, the day after which they put up Christmas signage and begin the long grim march toward holiday sales on a street where gross sales have been in decline for years.

The first in our state of Virginia, the Loudoun Street Pedestrian Mall, and hence the First Friday event, centers around an 1840 high columned courthouse, complete with Confederate statue in front, gun in hand and bronze eyes eternally vigilant for the next attack from up north. Loudoun Street is named for John Campbell, 4th Earl of Loudoun, a Scottish nobleman and supposed military leader who managed to lose his entire regiment during the Jacobite Rising of 1745. As punishment, Loudoun was sent to the American colonies as Commander-in-Chief, where he could do less harm. However, he managed to do so, losing the frontier to the French and Indians, for which he was promoted and sent to Spain. Shortly afterward, a local land speculator and small-fry militia officer named George Washington – who quite understood the value of property protection – built the largest earthen fort of the French and Indian war, now reduced to a hill overlooking our First Friday celebration. In fact, the house from which I write this is located on what was once the fort’s parade ground. If real estate values and American history had anything to do with one another, the “For Sale” sign would not still be sticking up in my front yard lo these many months.

Strange as it may sound to some, there have been moments when our main street pedestrian mall has brought tears to my eyes. My childhood still lives somewhere between its dank old alleys and its refurbished colonial buildings, and haunts the shadowed side streets as one of those ancestral ghosts old men are so hesitant to let go of. One of my direct ancestors opened a leathersmith’s shop in 1781 on this three-block stretch that still constitutes most of our main street commercial activity. Having seen the letters and optimistic advertisements of John William Bageant, Revolutionary War veteran and former indentured apprentice turned saddle and glove maker, it saddens this crusty old heart to see that many, if not most businesses here, are struggling to stay open while others are just the expensive hobbies of developers’ and doctors’ wives. And so walking Loudoun Street, with its numerous empty “commercial spaces” is a melancholy experience.

Two hundred and twenty five years of the ordinary history of hopeful, toiling, freedom loving craftsmen, men with fingers bloodied by the cordwainer’s needle, the wheelwright’s and gunsmith’s toil vanished into the ether. All that cumulative effort reduced to trinketry and much very bad art – small watercolors of flowers that looked like they were done by a six-year-old, framed in gilt and on sale for $350, most of which were painted by hobbyists, wives and daughters of the already rich. Ten generations of craft, toil and small town mercantilism reduced to brass wind chimes with colonial motifs made in the Confucian capitalist gulags of the new industrial China. In the new globalized America, having deep roots in a place sooner or later comes to be painful. In all likelihood, the guy in Dongguan, China who made the wind chimes weeps at the memory of some remembered village street too.

Gimme a Bud Light and a Wedge of Pont-l’Evêque

Now that the artificial prosperity of the Clinton years is over, downtown boutiquers find themselves unable to sell local Southern specialties, such as those $550 framed Mort Kunstler prints of that most cold blooded of Civil War killers, Stonewall Jackson, who sucked on lemons while condemning his men into unimaginable slaughter. In the most famous of these prints Stonewall Jackson, pensively seated, asks for “Divine Guidance” while his men look on reverently. This famous (to Southerners at least) print is based on no actual event, but is a simulacra – an image of an image of something that, in this case, never happened. It is derived from a fictional scene from the worst Civil War movie ever made, “Gods and Generals.” Jackson’s Civil War headquarters, now a museum restored with the help of Mary Tyler Moore, of all people, is located maybe 50 yards from my back yard fence. In the past few years Stonewall Jackson has become the number one heroic figure of a fundamentalist movement called “Christian Manliness.” There is an eerie reverence about the visitors pouring from the tour buses outside my window to visit this shrine with its Confederate flag and cannon out front, rather symbolically pointed at Winchester’s black neighborhood.

Anyway, except for a few business owners who’ve owned their downtown buildings for a long time, things are slowly and inexorably drifting down the crapper. The fact that we have a Dollar General store plunked down amid this mélange of historical buildings and boutique businesses speaks volumes about our downtown economy. One very honest boutique merchant says, “After tonight I am closing down. I’m just plain tired of sitting around waiting for nothing.” Watching the public pretense of doing business in an economy rotting from the inside out is almost Kafkaesque in its interior grimness and exterior smiling and polishing of goods. Another downtowner tells me he/she hasn’t made a sale over $15 in two weeks, mostly art bookmarks, stationary and similar doodads.

It just could have to do with the fact that this walking mall is surround on three sides by low wage semi-slum dwellers who, after coming home on a Friday dead tired from the loading docks out there at the pasta plant, would prefer to spend eight bucks on a 12-pack and chill out, rather than come down here to figure out what to do with a heated brie knife or taste a South African cab from a thimble sized plastic cup. In the pedestrian mall’s 35-year existence, it has yet to occur to the town’s owning class leadership that, walking distance or not, it might be nice if the walkers were prosperous enough to actually buy something, and that it might also be nice if that something were actually useful.

In the end however, it’s about class distinctions that have to do with some imagined sense of taste – Care Bears and Doritos casseroles vs. the $500 latte/espresso maker and Chateau Larrivet-Haut-Brion. It’s about the tasteful and the unwashed, which here in the South somehow manage to pass one another at the juncture of kitschy Stonewall Jackson worship. Yet class distinctions have little to do with money and how much of it you make, whether it be 20-K a year or 200-K. The owning classes, and business and corporate classes will always accept your money, whether you willingly spend it a some mall, or have to be hypnotized into doing so through television, or they have to beat it out of your ass when push comes to shove. And it matters not one fritter the color of your skin or whether you are a Mexican laborer getting a usurious payday loan, or the bimbo wife of a doctor shopping at Saks. Class is about power over others, both perceived and real. You can be whiter than the inside of one of Grandma’s biscuits and still be a caste untouchable and cultural nigger. For example:

Are these wind chimes Biblically correct ma’m?

Sitting on a wicker bench outside a gallery I watch a 50-ish guy with a whitewall haircut, who probably drifted downtown from the lower working class neighborhood three blocks over. He is a fundamentalist Christian and is discussing whether First Friday is a “Biblically sanctioned Christian holiday” to an uncomfortable lady with a beautiful Virginia Tidewater accent, a tight-for-fifty butt well presented by expensive, trendy Capri pants; clearly she is the victim of too much exercise, healthy food and full medical coverage.

Now Whitewall is not preaching to anyone, just doing what would pass for making conversation in his lower working class white Christian Virginian caste. He is probably not a hard core Christian fundamentalist because if he were, he would not be down here where they are not only drinking alcohol, but giving the damned stuff away for free. Capri Pants is uncomfortable as hell just being near Mr. Whitewall and he can feel it and he can feel that there is a class wall between them four hundred feet high and made of kryptonite. One of them is a piece of shit and it ain’t her.

If Capri Pants had simply taken the man seriously as a human being, and maybe opened the discussion toward the difference between religious and secular celebrations, they might have actually had a conversation. One in which Mr. Whitewall – who I’d bet a bottle of good gin never graduated from high school – would have learned something he didn’t know and wouldn’t have minded learning it at all. Obviously he wasn’t there to argue with anyone, but just to see what this First Friday stuff was all about. So he remains in a white cultural ghetto three blocks away bounded by religion and ignorance. And she remains in a white cultural ghetto circumscribed by recreational boutique shopping, the severe capitalist indoctrination certified by her college degree, and the Oprah Book Club. You can be very damned white and middle class in this country and be living in a ghetto.

According to the US census, we’ve got 789 black people and 4000 Hispanics living within walking distance of this Friday night purchasing opportunity. Not a one of them seems to be here this evening. (Although three large, out of town black men wearing Washington DC sports team gear huddle by an iron post supporting the mall’s antique clock, observing the scene from behind sunglasses. I’d kill to know what they are smiling and chuckling about). Yet the whiteness of First Friday is not – contrary to what an outside liberal observer might think – a racial thing. Race has been ever used, and very effectively in America, to hide class issues. And besides, the good merchants get mighty tolerant when a debit card or cash is exposed. Case in point: A couple of weeks ago I walked down to the pedestrian mall wearing wrinkled flannel pajama bottoms, house slippers and a beat up, sweat stained fishing vest and sporting a week’s growth of beard – my basic ensemble when I am holed up writing. Old Southern men can be ornery for the sheer fuck of it, so I just got up from the keyboard and walked downtown to get a few things. As long as I was filling my shopping bag all I got were smiles (to my face at least.) If you are spending money in such an outfit, even smelling mildly of bourbon and B.O., you are merely eccentric. Had I been dressed the same and pushing a shopping cart full of aluminum cans, I’d have been told by the cops to move on, or maybe arrested for theft of, and deadly possession of, a shopping cart.

The party that won’t die

Meanwhile, here within the inner bastion of the free-wheeling market capitalist economy, the party never ends. Every day we get something for nothing, by god! If it isn’t free cheese or free airline miles, or timeshare trial offers, then it’s a free service or free special event. I see in the Winchester Star that tomorrow offers yet another special event and service balled up into one: a “Privacy Day” sponsored by American Background Services. Powerful in “data resource exchange” according to its corporate self-description, ABS is owned by the Control Risk Group or CRG, a global company that provides criminal histories, personal credit and driving records, and something called “U.S. Treasury enforcement” to anyone willing to pay. And tomorrow – oh joy of joys! – American Background is offering free shredding and destruction of personal or business information to anyone who delivers their own private records into the hands of CRG at a drop off point.

Something about that smells stronger than the most pungent cheese being spread on the retail communion wafers of First Friday. But after watching people pretending to do business with people pretending to be shopping, well, delivering your most private matters into the hands of people who are paid to spy on your personal life doesn’t surprise me one bit.

]]> http://www.lacuadraonline.com/featured-stories/special-commentary/feed/ 0 http://www.lacuadraonline.com/featured-stories/the-coffee-trade-nothing-fair-about-it/ http://www.lacuadraonline.com/featured-stories/the-coffee-trade-nothing-fair-about-it/#comments Wed, 15 Apr 2009 23:45:39 +0000 Laura Shearer http://lacuadraonline.com/?p=86 The farmers said they left the building feeling dejected. Their application for a coffee export license had been denied by Anacafé a third time. The process started about six months before when Jorge, not a coffee farmer himself but a resourceful man who had offered to help, went to the Anacafé office to learn what was required and to pick up the appropriate application forms. Anacafé, the national Guatemalan association for the coffee industry, is the entity responsible for issuing all coffee export licenses, like the ones these farmers were seeking.

The farmers were part of a seven-member cooperative of coffee producers from the Panchoy Valley surrounding Antigua. All of the farmers were on the small-end of the production scale; each farmer had, on average, about a quarter-hectare planted to coffee. The larger plantations in the Valley have several hundred hectares.

Jorge had helped the farmers complete the forms and prepare the necessary documentation prior to their first meeting with Anacafé, yet when the farmers went to the Anacafé office they were told that they had completed the wrong forms. They were given another set of the exact same forms. Two months later the farmers returned for the second time with the forms completed. Anacafé told the farmers they needed a bank statement showing that they had Q20,000 in capital reserves. In addition, Anacafé told them they needed a specific form from their mayor, which they could get in their local municipal offices, certifying that they each had at least five hectares already planted to coffee. Anacafé documentation does not list any of these requirements.

The farmers were clearly frustrated, but the Anacafé assessor told them that they need not worry. They did not need an export license. They could sell their coffee to Anacafé, instead. Legally, Anacafé is a private, non-profit entity. Officially, it does not purchase or sell coffee.

The farmers met with their mayor, who told them that the form they were requesting did not exist. The mayor said that he could, for Q200, perform an onsite inspection of their farms and write a letter. The farmers could not afford the “fee,” so they returned to Anacafé for the third time with their original documentation. Anacafé rejected the farmers’ application again, though this time it was not because they didn’t have the proper paperwork from their mayor, or because they had less than five hectares each, but because their land titles were recorded in cuerdas (a widely-recognized unit of land measurement in Guatemala equivalent to 33 meters on a side) rather than in meters. Jorge and the farmers told me that when they questioned this logic the Anacafé assessor held up a sheet of paper and pointed to a few lines of text, indicating where it said that all documentation was to be in meters.

The assessor had assumed that none of the farmers could read. In reality, the paper was an intra-office memo inviting staff members to a farewell event.

When I set out to investigate this story, I intended to write about the trade certification models for Guatemala’s largest export commodity, but along the way I discovered much darker truths. After working for several years in a non-government organization on coffee-related issues, I had become skeptical about the benefits of international trade certification programs. I suspected, and still believe, that the concept of “fair trade” is more a marketing ploy to assuage the conscience of consumers than a regimen to ensure ethical trading. But after hearing these farmers’ stories, I realized that unfairness in the coffee industry is far more profound and far more maddening.

“Fair Trade Certified” is a trademark of TransFair USA (a member of Fairtrade Labeling Organizations International). The principles of Fair Trade state that a fair price must be paid to producers, fair labor conditions must be afforded to workers, trade must be direct and conducted by democratic and transparent organizations, and community development and environmental sustainability must be central to the process. TransFair USA has certification programs for coffee, tea, cocoa, fresh fruit, sugar, honey, rice, vanilla, flowers and wine.

I had intended to investigate how, and how well, TransFair USA’s coffee certification model was being implemented in the local coffee industry, but soon found out that there actually were no Fair Trade Certified producers in the Antigua Valley. Fundamentally, this is because Fair Trade certification is costly and brings no measurable benefit to Antigua coffee plantations nor to small coffee farmers.

First, to attain certification, a coffee producer must pay application and certification fees totaling over $2,000 for their first year of operation and over $1,000 for each subsequent year. Depending on the number of products, processing installations and members in the producer’s organization, these amounts can increase significantly. To put these costs in perspective, the national legal minimum wage for Guatemalan agricultural workers is equivalent to $1,715 annually. Minimum wage for agricultural workers, Q52 per day, is currently the same as minimum wage for non agricultural workers. Historically, however, it has been significantly lower.

Second, the current Fair Trade Certified price for washed Arabica green coffee from Central America is $1.35 per pound or the current New York Commodities Market price, whichever is higher. At the time of this writing the Commodities Market price per pound was $1.13. The reality, however, is that coffee cultivated in the Antigua Valley commands a much higher price on the international market. Antigua coffee is mostly the highly-prized Arabica variety and is grown at an altitude of 4,500 feet or higher. Coffee grown at this altitude is classified “Strictly Hard Bean.” This means that it is widely considered to be of specialty or gourmet grade. Prices for green coffee grown in the Antigua Valley generally range between $2.00 and $8.00 a pound.

Third, to attain Fair Trade certification producers must demonstrate that they have the ability to export their product, which the vast majority of them, as will become clear, cannot do. Thus, the only producers who might benefit from the protections of a Fair Trade Certified price are the ones currently selling their coffee for less than $1.35 a pound. These farmers, clearly, are the most disadvantaged and vulnerable to exploitation. Less advantaged producers are also, generally, those who lack the education and capital necessary to develop the skills, purchase the machinery and nurture the connections necessary to successfully export their product. But if they cannot demonstrably convince TransFair USA that they can export their crop, they cannot attain Fair Trade certification. Didn’t Joseph Heller once write a book on this subject?

Evidently, TransFair USA’s Fair Trade certification doesn’t address the underlying problems of unfairness in local coffee production. But there is another model in use in the Antigua Valley: the Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) standards.

CAFE is the model used by Starbucks, the world’s largest coffee house and buyer of 25% of Guatemala’s coffee exports. The stated objectives of CAFE are to ensure that coffee is responsibly grown and ethically traded. Integral to these standards is the concept of “sustainability,” which is defined as “an economically viable model that addresses the social and environmental needs of all the participants in the supply chain from farmer to consumer.” Participating producers are required to pay a CAFE approved verifier to conduct annual audits of their plantations.

A friend of mine, whom we will call Luis, is a member of the seven-member cooperative mentioned earlier that tried to obtain a green coffee export license from Anacafé. He, like his other friends in the cooperative, which, three years after their dealings with Anacafé, has grown to 20 members, now has about one and a half hectares dedicated to coffee. Luis owns his land and works it himself with the help of a few seasonal employees. His farm is dwarfed by a nearby plantation of several hundred hectares, which, incidentally, supplies green coffee to Starbucks. I wanted to investigate how “ethical, responsible and sustainable” this Starbucks supplier was, so I asked Luis to connect me with a staff member of the nearby plantation for an interview and tour.

At first glance, I was impressed. The premises were clean and well organized. They recycled their water and re-used their organic waste as fertilizer. And they had an employee benefits package that rivaled the perks of my old corporate career. Moreover, there was an elementary school onsite and the plantation paid bonuses twice a year. The plantation paid full-time employees overtime, and these workers accrued credit in the Guatemalan social security system. Further, the plantation provided full-time employees with housing and, to round out the image, no full-time employees were under 18 years of age.

I saw a man turning coffee, laid out in perfect arcs on a soccer field sized concrete patio. I asked my guide, whom we will call Edgar, how much someone like the coffee turner would be paid. He said he was a full-time employee, and imagined he was paid about Q50 per day – which is just shy of minimum wage for agricultural workers (Q52 per day). Less promising, when I later talked to Luis, he reported that about a year ago one of his friends, who was a full-time worker at the same plantation, was paid Q35 per day. Minimum wage in 2007 was Q44.58 for agricultural workers.

The only real discrepancy I saw between the CAFE standards and the plantation’s practices were with the working conditions of seasonal employees. However, this is vitally important because during harvest time (typically November to March) this plantation increases its labor force by up to 600%.

CAFE standards require that producers pay all temporary/seasonal workers the nationally or regionally-established minimum wage. (In Guatemala, minimum wages are set by the federal Ministerio de Trabajo y Previsión Social. Wages vary by industry, not by region.) Also, if there is insufficient access to public education, the producers must provide the primary school age children of seasonal workers who live on site with access to instruction, facilities, and materials that meet national education standards. Producers must not directly contract any persons under the age of 14 and workers who live onsite must be provided with habitable dwellings by the plantation owner.

Locally, seasonal workers are called cuadrillas. When I asked my guide, Edgar, about the cuadrillas and the benefits they received, he shrugged and said they were “different.” At the plantation where he worked a contractor was paid to find people to work the harvest season and was paid for each person he or she recruited. Usually these workers came in groups from rural areas and labored for a month at a time. Importantly, as will become clear, the contractor managed the cuadrillas, not the plantation.

When Glamis Gold began constructing its $254 million open-pit gold and silver mine in Guatemala’s Western Highlands in 2004, the company promised residents in the Department of San Marcos jobs, schools and other social projects, in exchange for letting it extract precious metals. But a few years later, Elida Lopez Tojil, a lifelong resident of Sipacapa, says she has seen only contamination from the mine, though it is not lost on her that the Marlin project earned Goldcorp, the Canadian firm that bought Glamis in 2006, $72.8 million last year alone.

“When they first came here, they said they were going to give us training, give us jobs,” says Lopez Tojil, who runs a restaurant in Sipacapa, a small town connected to the rest of the world by pitted dirt roads. “But we haven’t seen any benefit . . . only contamination.”

Lopez Tojil fears that the mine and the chemicals it is using may have damaged the region’s main means of subsistence – agriculture. Recently, peach and other fruit trees have been less productive, she says. “We don’t know why, but there’s less fruit. This is the land of avocados, but there aren’t good avocados anymore.”

Lopez Tojil also worries that the mine – which uses cyanide to leach gold and silver ore from unearthed soil – might be contaminating the food she serves to her customers and family. Produce from Tres Cruces, San Isidro and other villages close to the mine is sold at the Sipacapa market.

“I’m buying [vegetables] with distrust . . . I don’t feel sure that they’re clean,” she says. ”It worries me that [the company is] taking all the flowers from the earth, all the riches. And us, what are we going to eat?”

Contamination Fears

Lopez Tojil’s fears appear justified. Two organizations have recently found that the mine may be contaminating nearby rivers and creating water shortages for villagers. The Latin American Water Tribunal, an international environmental justice organization, found after a review of the Marlin project in September that Montana Exploradora, S.A. (the local subsidiary of Goldcorp) has damaged the environment in the two municipalities of San Miguel Ixtahuacan, where the majority of the mine is located, as well as Sipacapa.

Weeks later, the Pastoral Commission Peace and Ecology (COPAE) of San Marcos presented a report to the media, the Ministry of Environment and Natural Resources (MARN), and the Union of Mines (Gremial de Minas) that did little to assuage local fears. The study contained the results of a year’s worth of monitoring local rivers and streams. Their analysis was sobering.

COPAE recorded the temperature, pH levels and electrical conductivity of the water at five points every month. Tests were also conducted to determine the presence of various heavy metals and chemicals, including iron, aluminum, manganese and arsenic. These substances, while naturally occurring, can foul groundwater when they are separated during the mining process.

Of great concern to COPAE was the discovery that arsenic levels found in the Quivichil stream, located below Marlin’s center of operations, had increased markedly over a period of months in 2008. According to their study, arsenic levels in the stream exceeded what is considered safe by Guatemala’s Ministry of Environment, the Canadian government, the World Bank, and the United States Environmental Protection Agency. “The presence of arsenic in the waters of the Quivichil stream is alarming and worrying,” the report states.

The World Health Organization has found that long-term exposure to arsenic can cause several kinds of cancers and a severe blood disease, and increase the risk for heart disease, diabetes and reproductive defects. Rashes and skin infections, which COPAE staff say have been afflicting residents in San Miguel since the project began, are a common short-term effect.

Fausto Valiente, COPAE’s agronomic engineer who worked on the study, says that the results of the monitoring are “an alert for the population” in San Miguel and Sipacapa that it is possible their water is being contaminated. Valiente says that COPAE’s results are not those of an independent, accredited lab and that more rigorous testing, over a longer period of time, is needed.

“What we want is to at least have immediate results made for ourselves and . . . to know if contamination exists or not,” said Valiente, adding that COPAE will continue monitoring water around the mine. The report is also intended as a push to the MARN to “do their job,” Valiente said, by monitoring the practices and impacts of the mine more closely.

The report yielded some success on Oct. 1, when Luis Ferrate, Minister of the Environment and Natural Resources, Douglas Gonzalez, the manager of the Union of Guatemalan Mines, and Bishop Alvaro Ramazzini, of the Diocesis of San Marcos, agreed to regularly monitor the rivers and water sources around Marlin, according to an Oct. 2 article in Prensa Libre. Still, Valiente said, monitoring by an independent lab would be best.

Representatives from Goldcorp have refused to comment for this story, but the company’s 2007 monitoring report for Marlin says water testing by the Asociacion de Monitoreo Ambiental Comunitorio (an independent group set up to monitor water quality) shows that water quality complied with Guatemalan and World Bank standards.

Controversial Project

The Marlin Mine has been controversial since it was first proposed in the late 1990s. Guatemala gave Glamis a 25-year exploitation license in 2003 and construction began in May 2004. The following month, the International Finance Corporation – the arm of the World Bank Group that funds private-sector projects – backed the Marlin project with a $45 million loan. The company bought roughly 8 square kilometers of land from more than 250 owners, paying 4,000 quetzales per cuedra (or $4,671 per acre), according to Goldcorp documents. The company has since bought more land as a buffer.

Most of the mine, 85 percent, is located in San Miguel Ixtahuacan. The rest of the mine is in Sipacapa, where the strongest opposition has come from. On June 18, 2005, Sipacapa held a consulta – or referendum – on the mining project. Of the 13 villages in Sipacapa municipality, 11 voted against mining, one voted for, and the other abstained. But the consulta was never honored. Glamis and the Ministry of Energy and Mines challenged the vote as unconstitutional. Although the court was critical of the company and the government in its decision, it ruled that the consulta was not binding because the authority to regulate mining belonged to the Ministry of Energy and Mines, not the municipality, according to a 2007 article in the University of Toronto’s Indigenous Law Journal.

Today, most of Sipacapa is still strongly opposed to Marlin’s presence in their municipality, people there say. “[We] don’t want to talk, [we] don’t want to negotiate,” says Oracio Perez Perez, a teacher in Sipacapa. The people of Sipacapa are unique, he says, with a long history of resistance and cultural preservation. “We are a people who maintain our unity.” However, in San Miguel, he says the population initially agreed to the project because they knew it would bring them a new road. Now, however, “people  there are divided,” he said.

Impact and Benefits

Health-wise, one of the biggest concerns about the mine is the fact that it uses cyanide leaching. The same lethal chemical used in gas chambers, cyanide is highly toxic and can poison people through inhalation, ingestion or skin or eye contact. Despite its toxicity, cyanide is useful to the mining industry because it makes it possible to glean gold and silver from land with low grades of ore, according to an article posted on the Mining Watch Canada website written by Robert Moran, a hydrologist and geochemist from the US-based Mineral Policy Center.

According to the International Cyanide Management Institute, gold and silver are generally found only at very low concentrations in ores. Because of this, chemical processes are the only economically viable way to extract the precious metals. When cyanide is mixed with water and then used to wash the extracted ore it bonds with tiny particles of gold and silver, separating them from the other components of the ore. Then a secondary chemical process is used to separate the cyanide from the gold and silver. The cyanide cannot be reused and must be treated as waste. The mine operators are then expected to make the cyanide inert before dumping it into local streams and rivers.

Along with the potential for cyanide pollution reaching the local community, the process requires vast quantities of water, creating competition in communities around mines, especially in areas used primarily for agriculture. COPAE’s recent report cites that Marlin uses 250,000 liters of water per hour to operate the mine – the same amount of water used by a local family in 22 years. Perez Perez, the teacher in Sipacapa, says that some springs have dried, pushing residents to look for water in neighboring areas. Lopez Tojil, the restaurant owner, says that a couple of months ago Sipacapa went without water for three days, after people in Chual – where Sipacapa’s water comes from, and where she says water levels have been waning – cut off the supply as a pressure to force out Fundación Sierra Madre, a foundation created by Goldcorp.

I can smell it. Corina cannot.

The dump is outside of the city, down a cracked-pavement and dirt road that winds past an ageing rum distillery and over two creeks, one brown and foaming, the other mercifully clear and alive with minnows. We pass a sugar cane field on the left and another fenced-in factory on the right. Crammed into a silver Volkswagen Beetle the road feels bumpier than it looks. I’m in the front seat. Our driver is saying something. Christ. He’s been talking since we left Antigua. He’s still talking. After an hour and a half of driving, first past coffee fields and patchwork hills, then sugarcane and rolling countryside, he’s still talking. Ninety minutes of inane chatter from the driver’s seat.

“So you are writing a story for a magazine?”

“Yeah…I think so.”

“What magazine?”

“It’s called La Cuadra. Based out of Antigua. It’s pretty small.”

“I’ve never heard of it. What is the focus of the magazine?” He’s looking at me, not at the road. Short hair, orange sweatshirt, just over five feet tall. He has little hands with fingers like those tiny hot dogs they sell from the carts on the Calzada. Hot Dog-Fingers. Does he have to say ‘magazine’ in every freaking sentence? He’s still looking at me. Still not watching the road, the oncoming traffic, waiting for an answer. I hesitate, looking at his hands.

“Uhm….There’s a lot of political stuff. And art….all kinds of things.” I want to tune him out. I glance back at Michael and Katie stuffed into the back seat. I wish he had a stereo instead of a hole in the dashboard. He looks in the rear view, talking to Michael now.

“So if you want to hear about the economic situation in Guatemala I can tell you quickly. First there are three classes….” He expounds.

I am way too hung over for this.

Michael listens and nods and responds as Hot Dog-Fingers attempts to educate us on Guatemala’s class system. Nobody learns anything, but I keep hearing responses from the back seat.

Hot Dog-Fingers continues, “You have an upper class. That’s all the rich people. Business people and things like that. They are mostly in the city.” He’s watching the back seat in the rear view, perhaps trying to discern whether the proper attention is being paid to his vast knowledge.

“Oh yeah? Wow.”

“Yes. And then you have a middle class. Those are the people in the middle.” Another glance in the mirror.

“Right. Uh huh.”

“And then there’s the lower class. The people who live on the dump. They are in the lower class.”

I stop listening. I don’t know how Michael can deal with this. Perhaps because he’s still in school and more accustomed to being lectured. More used to being talked at rather than to. Though I’m not really sure how much lecturing goes on in a college photo-journalism program in San Francisco.

Santa Lucia sits in the lowlands near the Pacific coast. The usual tangle of dirty streets lined with tiendas and comedores. For lunch we are offered a choice between McDonald’s and Pollo Campero. Outside of town it’s all sugarcane and heat. Pockets of vine-clad jungle scattered between fields where men in orange suits spray God only knows what chemicals onto endless waving cane. Palm trees linger here and there, clustered around the white silos of refineries that process all this greenery into clear, crystalline sugar. It’s hot here. Thick, muggy, sweaty hot. Too hot. Everything broils.

We meet our contact in Santa Lucia on the side of a road near a gas station. His name is Nestor, a large bearded man on a motor bike in a tight red shirt with sunglasses perched on his nose. The head of an NGO in the area, Fraternidad de Cotzumalguapa, he advocates computer literacy for adults and children and is currently funding and facilitating the completion of a school for the children of Santa Lucia’s dump. As we follow Nestor’s round, red form down the road towards our destination I wonder what lies ahead. Images flash through my mind of half-naked children picking over endless tracts of trash, their faces frozen in perpetual frowns. Crippled old men, sick women, open sewers and clapboard houses. As we approach and enter the slum the ugly pictures in my head become grim realities.

One room shacks of plastic, metal, and rotting plywood compete for space between shallow ditches of sluggish grey waste water. Feather-less chickens and skinny puppies scramble out of the way as our VW creeps by. I can smell it through the open windows. The stench of rot, of festering death. The smell of the slum is distinct, almost rich and organic, but tainted by a bitterness that sticks in the back of the throat and inundates the sinuses. It is almost the rich, fertile odor of a rural agricultural community, but with a top note of exhaust and industrial waste. The car stops and we struggle out on sore legs. Fifteen or twenty people stand around a tiny shop, watching us. They are smiling.

Juan Carlos wants a new roof. And he needs it. He sits on his bed, one of two, that combined, almost completely fill the room, and points to the rust-edged holes where the rain comes through. Fist-sized balls of light on a roof otherwise completely blackened by soot from an indoor cooking fire. He has a job in town and no longer works on the dump, though all three of his sons spend every afternoon there. They often suffer from stomach illnesses. He blames contaminants from the trash.

His is the smallest house I’ve seen yet. About the size of my bedroom growing up. He is afraid. Afraid for the health of his children, afraid for their future. Afraid they will continue to suffer from poor-health. “No hay ningunos medicos aquí,” he says. He has no money to pay them anyway. Looking out at the patch of dirt that is his yard, a dog that might be dead already, a woman washing dishes in filthy water, a bedraggled rooster tied by the leg to a post, I am afraid for his children, too.

Nestor ambles towards us, grinning. He wants to show us his school and leads us down a narrow foot path between sagging hovels. We can hear the cacophony of young voices before we can see the school which sits on the edge of the village, almost abutting the fields of refuse. One large room with a concrete floor and rows of children in rickety desks. It is divided into three classroom spaces by walls of cinder block that don’t reach the ceiling. The whole thing is painted sky blue except for the thundercloud gray corrugated metal roof. Anything resembling study dissolves with our appearance. Kids lean towards each other whispering and giggling, pointing our direction. Outsiders are a novelty here. There are three full class rooms but only two teachers. 110 students altogether Nestor tells us. Four teachers work here, all volunteers. I wonder where the other two are.

It’s almost noon, quitting time at the school, and the two teachers dismiss their students. Our arrival has killed any hope of continued education this morning. Kids swarm us, shaking our hands, asking our names, smiling and laughing and repeatedly pointing out that I am very tall. Michael pulls out his camera and snaps off a few pictures, more to appease them than from any kind of journalistic instinct. A small boy with dirt smeared on his cheek approaches me.

“Como se llama?” he asks, eyes crinkled by a smile.

“Soy Kevin,” I reply.

“Kebín!? Si!? Yo también!” He runs to a group of boys in a corner to relate this incredible information. Watching them talk, pointing at me and laughing, I can’t help but smile.

The school, like the rest of the village, has no running water and the pit toilets behind it are only partially finished. Students have to run home or to a neighbor if they need to use a bathroom. They’ve been holding classes here for over three years. Hot Dog-Fingers asks if we would like to see the dump. We shuffle our feet, smile, and give only the slightest indication of nods. This suddenly feels like a very uncomfortable package tour.

A train of children follow as we walk the 300 feet or so to the dump’s ‘entrance’. There is no fence, nor officials monitoring the site. Only a rickety wooden bridge patched with an old mattress crossing what must once have been a very pretty stream. And then you’re on it. Garbage of all descriptions in every direction. Torn fabric, fast food wrappers, chunks of cars and bicycles, piles of clipped leaves and orange peels, discarded toys, sections of sheet-rock, cans, bottles and bones and on and on and on. Vultures hover above in thick clouds. Harbingers of death that have been reduced to surveyors of refuse. Men, women and children work in clusters here and there, sorting through endless piles in search of recyclables, mostly plastic bottles, to turn in for cash.

Forty pounds of plastic earns a working family 70 Quetzales.

The group of children on our heels fan out, ignoring the scattering flocks of scavenging birds, and start picking over the waste. They’re smiling, laughing, talking as they wander over jagged metal and broken glass. One group of boys throws endless glass bottles at a lizard lazing on the edge of the stream. A girl in front of me picks up a plastic sunscreen bottle and seems delighted when she discovers a little left in the bottom. She pockets it. I see an old woman propped on a decaying mattress as she watches her kids work a few feet away. A torn umbrella attached to what appears to be a ski pole shades her as she calls instructions to them, laughing.

“No no! La otra, la otra.”

I can’t tell what she’s pointing at and neither can the little girl she’s hollering to. They both laugh, all smiles. I wander deeper into the dump and light a cigarette, trying to make sense of the landscape. For a split second I wonder what to do with the butt then laugh out loud as I flick it over my shoulder. What does it matter?

Maria has never been interviewed before and doesn’t understand what’s wanted of her. Perched on the edge of the bed she listens as Michael tries to explain the process through Hot Dog-Fingers.

“It’s gonna be like a multi-media piece. So maybe you’ll see a picture of her and hear a clip of her talking about her life here. But my voice can’t be on it. So if I ask her her name she has to say ‘My name is Maria’ instead of just ‘Maria’, she has to say the question in her answer. Got it?”

“Right, OK.”

He translates the instructions. She doesn’t really get it, and coming from Hot Dog-Fingers everything sounds more like a command. She keeps answering the questions as if in conversation and everything has to be recorded two or three times. It’s painful to watch, this repetition. Eventually she reverts to simply parroting everything Hot Dog-Fingers tells her to say, a look of bewilderment on her face. She sounds like a small child delivering a well rehearsed lie.

The door is closed to keep background noise to a minimum and the temperature beneath Maria’s naked tin roof rises quickly. Sweat drips off my nose and splatters my notebook, making the ink run. I’m trying to listen, but even after 9 months in Guatemala my Spanish comprehension is inexcusably bad and I don’t catch everything. She tells us her children suffer often from headache and diarrhea. They don’t have enough to eat. Like most kids here they go to school in the mornings and work on the dump in the afternoons. She has family in the states but they are still paying off the ‘coyotes’ who smuggled them across the border and cannot send money back. She’s not sure where they are.

“La vida aquí es muy duro.” She clasps her hands tight on her lap and watches her daughter, two or three years old, as she rolls around on the bed beside her. The sentence is verbatim repetition of Hot Dog-Fingers. I look around her apartment: a couple of pans and one pot, two beds on the verge of collapse, a small dresser on top of which sits a television. Everyone has T.V.

If you walk to the edge of the Santa Lucia dump and plug your nose it’s easy to forget what’s behind you. Looking out you will see a vast expanse of rolling green punctuated by great leafy trees. Cattle graze in tall green grass, fat and contented. The silhouettes of massive volcanoes dominate the far horizon, peaceful, tranquil, and grand. You stand at the edge of a field of waste and gaze out at endless fields of promise. It is a stark line between filth and fecundity.

When I told my friend Luisa I was going to Santa Lucia she was surprised.

“Why?” She asked, and laughed. “There’s nothing there. I know. I grew up there.”

“Really? Do you ever go back?”

“Not very often. It’s different now. When I was a little girl the river was clean and beautiful. You could swim in it. Now all the run-off from the farms flows into it. There aren’t even fish anymore. And in the rainy season you could poke the ground with a stick and water would come gushing out!” She’s smiling at the memory. “Not anymore. It all goes to the sugarcane now.”

But standing on the edge looking out I can almost see the world she was remembering, lush and green and beautiful. And then I turn around, and behind me the tossed off shit of an entire city stretches out toward the bank of the river. It is the middle of the rainy season and thunderheads tower over every horizon but the river fills less than a quarter of it’s bed. A sickly brown trickle clogged with piles of thick chemical foam. No one is swimming.

I watch Michael below me in a low section of the dump. His camera is pressed to his face as he snaps shot after shot of a group of children unloading a recently arrived truck. I don’t know how he does it, standing feet or even inches in front of a his subject and looking at them only through a lens. It seems like such an overt form of journalistic voyeurism. I prefer hiding behind pen and paper and using memory and observation to fill out a story if my notes fail. Photographers can’t do that. As I clamber through the inspissated rot towards where he is standing I watch the children working. At first they pose, smile, put their arms around each other and mug for the camera and he takes an occasional picture. But after a few minutes they grow bored of him and get back to the business at hand. He’s so close to them. He’s so indiscreet. But after only ten or 15 minutes he has become little more than a piece of scenery in their eyes. And now he begins to work in earnest.

Michael’s primary goal is to document the impact of environmental problems on local populations. So far he has focused on Latin America but he hopes to travel to Asia, Africa, and Europe. He is in search of pathos, misery, and unbearable hardship. This dump – the people working on it, the poverty – is all a bit too chipper for him. He’s after something more heart wrenching and he wants Hot Dog-Fingers to help him find it. A conversation about diseases in Guatemala leads him to ask, “Is there like a clinic somewhere where they put all the people who are really sick? Maybe from AIDS? Like about to die?” Hot Dog-Fingers doesn’t think so. And a conversation about crime in Guatemala City inspires, “What’s the worst zone for crime in the city? Do you think you could organize a ride-along for me with the police or an ambulance?” I sit and listen. To dedicate ones life to the documentation of horror mystifies me. I guess someone should. And Michael seems to be very good at it. Hot Dog-Fingers doesn’t understand what he is attempting to do.

“I showed him some of the stuff on my web site. He liked some of it, but a lot of it he didn’t really seem to get. He doesn’t really get, like, aesthetics. Or art. Or style.” I almost double over laughing.

Marlise has followed us around for the better part of an hour. She wants to be interviewed. She wants to tell her story. “Tengo una situación muy crítica!” Eventually Michael submits. She invites us into her house and takes a seat on her bed. It’s a bigger place than most, yet feels more cluttered. An obviously broken radio, a pile of badly torn and stained clothing. She has a cement floor, the first I’ve seen in the village. As soon as the recorder is presented she begins to speak. No questions are asked. Marlise is a talker.

Her 11 year old son began having seizures just over a year ago, she says. There is a medication to control his affliction but she can’t afford to keep him on it. His legs spasm, his arms jerk, his eyes roll back into his head. The boy trembles and moans. A few months ago he had a bad one. Everyone in the village came to her house to help carry the shaking boy to the church. She sat with him, cried over him, “Mi hijo, mi hijo!” She said her good-byes. Everyone did. He survived. As she speaks she grows more and more frantic. She begins to rock back and forth, to gesture more and more with her arms, and eventually to cry. Tears roll down her cheeks and dapple the front of her shirt, glowing opalescent beside the fake mother of pearl buttons.

Michael hands the recorder to Hot Dog-Fingers and takes out his camera. He stands before her and I hear the familiar double click of the shutter again and again. She doesn’t seem to notice him and continues speaking, locked in a memory of dread, she seems inaccessible. And the tears continue to flow over her face, twin streams running from a spring of mourning. She is almost shouting now, her face twisted into a wailing grimace. All I can think of is the heat. I want a breeze, an open door, a fan, an ice cube. I’m sweating profusely again. And then I look at her. This heavy-set 37 year old, owner of the what may be the nicest house in the poorest area of Santa Lucia, blubbering and hysterical. Incapacitated by a memory she does not wish to relive.

When she calms down she produces her son’s medical records, begging us for help. Katie works for a public health NGO and Hot Dog-Fingers is a contact she has used before. He labors under the delusion that he too is an employee, and talks endlessly with Marlise about the possibility of assistance. Katie stands to the side, blonde, sweating, my girlfriend. She arranged this trip.

“We don’t work with cases like this. It’s not an operable problem. He’s just giving her false hope.” She picks up the bottle of pills the boy takes. “They don’t even use this for dogs anymore.”

Our second day on the dump begins badly. Michael wanted to arrive on site shortly after sunrise, and our pickup in Antigua was arranged for 5:45 am. Standing by the side of the road, searching for the silver pin-head blob of Hot Dog-Finger’s car, all I can think about is finishing the books and locking the bar the previous night. I had clicked shut the last pad-lock just after 3:30 am. After an hour’s wait, Hot Dog-Fingers picks us up at 6:45. His girlfriend is in the back seat. I have no idea why.

“She’s going to come along,” he says. Any hope of catching another hour of sleep on the drive is crushed by those words. Great. Five people in a Beetle.

Its a long, hot ride down from the mountains. Michael barely speaks. But neither does Hot Dog-Fingers. This is my sole consolation.

By the time we get to Santa Lucia the sun is high and the light harsh. We walk out to the dump, but very few people are working. The kids are already at school. Michael takes a few half hearted snaps. “Sorry guys,” he says. He’s already sweating from beneath his mop of curly brown hair. “No problem.” We all turn and look at Hot Dog-Fingers.

The dump will have to wait and we are led instead to a clear running fork of the river, apparently for lack of a better option. Two middle-aged women and a teenage girl stand in water up to their calves doing laundry. A couple of very small children dangle their toes in the water and watch the myriad tiny minnows dart about. Huge vine-clad trees drip honey-splattered shadows over everything and a wall of sugar cane in the background partially obscures the distant triangles of the great volcanoes Fuego and Acatenango. It is idyllic. Michael seems disappointed at the lack of destruction, mayhem and pathos but the scene is pretty enough and he spends 10 or 15 minutes snapping off photos of the smiling women, laughing children and dripping laundry laid over the strands of a barbed-wire fence. Katie and I stand around and talk about nothing, hold hands and try to count the fish.

Back on the dump in the afternoon I am struck by the number of dead cattle. It seems that everywhere I look there are bones, clumps of fur, horns sticking out of the trash, curiously ignored by the vultures and wandering dogs. Everywhere today the dump is on fire. I ask Hot Dog-Fingers why. He asks Nestor, Nestor asks a garbage truck driver who asks the woman who was standing right in front of us. “It’s full. They have to get rid of the garbage.” Children work all around us, apparently unaware of the choking miasma of burning plastic that surrounds them.

We leave just after sunset, groups of people in front of and behind us walking home after their day’s work. To their cook fires, their beds, their wells and their pit toilets. Some of the kids hold treasures discovered during the day: a plastic guitar with no strings, a doll with only one leg. The dump provides all life’s necessities, from wheel barrows to pots and pans. Baby clothes to furniture. Everything can be found there. They talk as they walk. One can always hear people talking on the Santa Lucia dump. Socializing is constant. Tears are outnumbered by laughter, frowns outpaced by smiles. It is a life, not of ease or luxury, but of honesty. People here work together, live together and die together. They are not satisfied, but nor are they defeated. Always there is friendship and family, and from this they build a kind of happiness.

Kevin Petrie lives in Antigua and works at Café No Sé. He fondly remembers a time when he could enjoy a hot-dog.

Michael Mullady is a photographer and journalist whose work can be seen at www.michaelmullady.com

Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Lula de Silva

When Venezuelans amassed in the streets of Caracas and loyal military units faced down rogue superiors in April of 2002, they may have symbolically ended more than just the coup d’etat against their republic’s constitutional government. Though conflated by Western media as an internal conflict spurred by the precipitous, firebrand ways of president Hugo Chávez, few in Latin America failed to see the fingerprints of the Bush administration on the coup. Such norteamericano machinations have littered the history of the region for more than a century, almost always at the behest of American financial elites, their corporations and their wealthy in-country peers, and always to the detriment of those countries’ broader populations.

But at the dawn of a new century, the old seeds failed to yield the desired fruit, instead stirring the ire of the Latin American community. Whether they loved, abided or even hated Chávez, 19 nations of the Rio Group, then meeting in San Jose, Costa Rica, issued a joint statement condemning the coup, as did the Organization of American States. Bush played a Cold War-worn game and lost. Six years later, the region has undergone a tectonic electoral shift to where the U.S. and its once unquestioned primacy as the unmoved mover in the region “risks finding itself pushed aside as an outdated and rather useless relic,” as Larry Birns, director of Council on Hemispheric Affairs, a liberal U.S. think-tank, put it in June 2006.

When Bush relinquishes the US presidency in less than half a year, he will leave his nation mired in a disastrous and legally untenable war, economically ravaged by predatory capitalism run amok, riddled with criminal scandal, and its prestige in the world in tatters. Historians, then or decades hence, will have little good to say of the administration’s tenure at the helm of the superpower, which it so single-mindedly dedicated to enforcing a global hegemony. And yet, for those “south of the border” where U.S. hegemony was once omnipresent, the Bush reign has effected just the opposite: a epoch-making, Latin America-wide shift leftward, away from, if not out of, Washington’s orbit.

In April, the people of Paraguay elected Fernando Lugo, a center-left populist and former Catholic priest, as their new president, ending 60 years of reactionary one-party rule in Paraguay. Lugo’s win is just the latest in the onslaught of progressive electoral victories that have, in less than a decade, ended a century-long lockdown on Latin American power by U.S.-backed right-wing oligarchs. He joins the likes of Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva of Brazil, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner of Argentina, Rafael Correa of Ecuador, Michelle Bachelet of Chile, Tabare Vazquez of Uruguay, Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua in what has been called the “Pink Tide.” Each represents different degrees of progress, from moderate reformers to left nationalists. Yet, in relative terms, all are utter Reds compared to the erstwhile U.S.-friendly regimes that preceded them and, should they aggregate as a bloc, pose the broadest regional breach of the U.S.’s hegemony and “neoliberal” economic orthodoxy in the world today.

If we apply standard U.S. electoral mapping, a telling graphic picture emerges. In the U.S., red is used to indicate states or districts that vote for the more conservative Republican Party, whereas blue is used to indicate where the ostensibly more progressive Democratic Party wins, yielding a common parlance of “red states” versus “blue states.” More detailed district-by-district mapping often shows states trending toward “red” or “blue,” often graphically rendered in hues of purple. Using a similarly graded system, if not wholly scientifically, the author mapped out changes in the Latin American politicalscape from 2000 (Map 1) up to Lugo’s win (April 2008, Map 2). The political shift in the region, in this light, is utterly stark. It finds Latin American ruling parties, coalitions and even presidential palaces now populated by the types of people the U.S. once dealt with via military counter-insurgency and death squads: unionistas (Lula), Liberation Theologians (Lugo), self-identified socialists (Chávez, Morales and Bachelet [sort of]), former armed revolutionaries (Ortega) and indigenous peasant movimientistas (Morales).

The Pink Tide has left the reactionary governments of Colombia and El Salvador, and to a lesser extent Mexico and Peru, as vestigial outcrops of the old U.S. client-state model – and even two of those must be footnoted. Mexico’s 2006 election remains clouded by considerable evidence of Bush administration-linked private agencies engaged in ballot-tampering in order to steal the hotly contested election from progressive nationalist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. And in El Salvador, gearing up for an election next March, polls show that for the first time the nation’s former leftist revolutionary front turned political party, the FMLN, will likely take the presidency in the person of the young, dynamic former journalist Mauricio Funes, whom some have called “El Salvador’s Obama.”

A short time ago Barack Obama,

Barack Obama has defended his friend and pastor by saying that while he disagrees with the content of Reverend Wright’s most vitriolic proclamations and that he sees a certain amount of racism imbedded in the words, he can no more distance himself from his friend than he can distance himself from his White grandmother who, on occasions, used racist language that made him cringe.  That is admirable and maybe even politically astute – time will tell.  Obama claims that he wishes to ennoble the ever difficult conversation on race in America by taking the dialogue out of the hands of the shouting heads and bringing a sense of comfort to the discussion of America’s original sin of racism.  That is also admirable, but what may be lost in the attempt to elevate the conversation is a recognition that some of the claims made by Reverend Wright are, in large part, correct.

This argument recently reared its head – or perhaps headed its rear – while I was tending bar at Café No Sé.  There seemed to be general agreement that Reverend Wright shouldn’t have said the things he did and certainly shouldn’t have thundered, “God Damn America!  That’s in the Bible!”

While the Surly Bartender isn’t real big on calling for the intercession of an Invisible Man in the Heavens for the purposes or blessing or damning anything, he’s still not convinced that we should immediately interpret Reverend Wright’s intentions as racist and unfounded blathering.  Seen in a historical perspective, much of what he said wasn’t that crazy at all.

By now, if you’ve had access to cable news from the States and not been living under a rock, you’ve likely seen the dashiki donned Reverend shouting in his gravely baritone that the United States government, “…wants us to sing God Bless America.  No, no, no!  Not ‘God Bless America!’  ‘God Damn America!’  That’s in the Bible!”

What you likely haven’t seen is the entire sermon – and without it, the context of the statements is utterly lost.

Reverend Wright was initially speaking of the nature of all human government.  His central argument is that while God is unchanging – governments are changeable.  They change, for better or for the worse, by the wisdom or perversion of those who decide and enforce the law.  He spoke of America and its long history of governmental racism towards its marginalized citizens.  He reminded his flock of the Dred Scott decision – when in 1859 the Supreme Court of the United States (in his words, “the Granddaddy Court of the one that stole the election in 2000″) claimed that no African American could ever be considered a citizen – whether they be slave or free.

These statements are true.  The Supreme Court of the United States did, in a decision written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, declare that African Americans were eternally barred from citizenship.  But as he notes, the government changed.  It took a civil war and 100 years of further struggle, but the government did change.

He noted that prior to the Administration of President Harry Truman (1945 – 1952) the Armed Forces of the United States were segregated.  That is true, but as he notes, governments change.

He noted that prior to the Civil Rights movement Americans of African descent had to eat in separate facilities, were barred from voting, faced legal discrimination, and even had to be buried in separate graveyards than White Americans.  In the Reverend’s words, “It was Apartheid, American Style, from the cradle to the grave.”  These statements are true, and yet, he notes, governments change.

For the good or the bad, governments change.

And then he let his flock know why.

For Reverend Wright, and for the far less doctrinal Surly Bartender, governments change for the better when they aspire to the precepts of love and justice; and that they change for the worse when those higher purposes are forsaken.

For religious folk these universal precepts are embodied in the nature of God.  For the more secular amongst us, they are the founding principles of a democratic society.  Whereas I might turn to the higher ideals of Jefferson, Douglass, Debs or King – The Reverend turns to scripture.  Specifically, Malachi 3:6.

“For I am the Lord and I change not.”

Reverend Wright expounds: “…where governments change, God does not change!  God is the same yesterday, today and forevermore.”

“God was against slavery on yesterday, and God – who does not change – is against slavery today. God, who was a God of love on yesterday and who does not change, is still a God of love today.  God, who was a God of justice on yesterday and who does not change, is still a God of justice today.”

He then preaches the dangers to nations that do not follow these central operating precepts.  He notes that the government in the scripture, the one of Caesar Augustus and Pontius Pilate, failed.  He notes that the British Empire failed.  He notes that the Russian Empire failed.  He notes that the Japanese Empire failed.  And he concludes:

“And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed – she put them on reservations.  When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly she failed – she put them in internment prison camps.  When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed – she put them in chains.  The government put them on slave quarters.  Put them on auction blocks.  Put them in cotton fields.  Put them in inferior schools.  Put them in substandard housing.  Put them in scientific experiments.  Put them in the lowest paying jobs.  Put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness.  The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three strike law and then wants us to sing God Bless America… No, no, no!  Not God Bless America!  God Damn America!  That’s in the Bible!  For killing innocent people, God Damn America! For treating her citizens as less than human, God Damn America so long as she tries to act like she is God and she is supreme!”