Open veins

Bolivia provides resistance and hope at Brokenhagen

2010-01-14T10:13:22-08:00

I have just published this article on TNI about my experience of working with the Bolivian government at the UN Copenhagen Climate Conference.

It was 3am on Saturday morning – a time you might expect to be heading home from a good party, certainly not waiting for a international diplomatic meeting to begin. Yet that was the reality on 19th December, as I sat with the Bolivian delegation in the main plenary of the UN Conference on Climate Change. Bolivia's negotiators however did not seem tired; rather furious and incredulous. For whilst we waited, the US and EU were out at press conferences celebrating a global UN accord on climate change that Bolivia and most of the world had not even seen.

The accord had been drawn up in a private meeting by the major powers with the token participation of a few other developing countries but had no mandate from the whole UN. To make matters worse, when the Danish Chair of the Conference eventually opened the session, he asked everyone to read the Accord and clearly expected everyone to approve it. Commotion broke out on the floor. Rene Orellana, the normally quiet-spoken Bolivia's Minister for Water and the Environment, angrily denounced the Copenhagen Accord in no uncertain terms: “This is no way to decide the future of humanity and the planet. We can not in one hour decide on the future of millions of people. We will not accept a document imposed by a small minority that does not respect consultations over the last two years with peoples and amongst governments.”

Thanks to the courage of Bolivia and a few other nations – and against huge pressure and threats to sign the deal - the UN did not endorse or adopt the accord but instead were forced to use the much weaker and vacuous language of “noting” it.
Flawed process

Sadly the catastrophic denouement of the Copenhagen conference was not atypical but rather symptomatic of a highly flawed process controlled by industrialised countries that are unwilling to take responsibility for climate change. I had been asked to volunteer my time as an unpaid media consultant (along with Denmark-based Ron Ridenour) by the Bolivia government, and witnessed up close the way the major powers at the conference did their best to silence voices such as Bolivia's but also how Bolivia's impressive team resisted and forced more radical demands for action onto the international political stage.

The power imbalance of countries at Copenhagen was immediately obvious as soon as I entered the aircraft-hangar like Bella Centre where the conference was held. Whilst the EU had a vast array of offices, and even its own pavilion and bar, Bolivia had to have meetings of its delegations in one of the conference centres. Whilst even NGO staff all seemed to sport blackberry and iphones, the Bolivian delegation had to resort to second hand mobile phones that exasperatingly ran out of pay-as-you-go credit at the wrong time. Bolivia at least had enough negotiators to just about cover the simultaneous sessions but had little capacity to do the analysis of different papers and positions that emerged during the talks. Bolivia's lead negotiator Angelica Navarro recounted one meeting where the EU official said he would send a document to his team of legal advisors. “Team??!” she scoffed. “I could do with one person but I only have enough people to attend the meetings.”

It also became obvious early on that there were two processes going on: one in the main conference hall that involved all countries that remained deadlocked, and another by the most powerful nations (and also those most responsible for climate change) held in dining rooms in hotels in Copenhagen. In the first few days it emerged, thanks to a leak in the Guardian, that the Danish Presidency had been holding secret talks with a small circle of countries to prepare a draft text (called the “Danish text”) without any mandate from the full Conference of Parties (192 nations) and divorced from the overall discussions. In the uproar that took place at the release of the text, the Danes pretended it was just one paper amongst many. Of course the Danes, in a fit of short-term amnesia, then repeated the exercise at the end causing the tumultuous final session and effective collapse of talks.

Pablo Solon, Bolivia's UN ambassador, aptly related it to the film, The Matrix, where it turns out that what humans perceive as reality is in fact stimulated by machines to keep the population subdued. “It seems negotiators are living in the Matrix, while the real negotiation is taking place in in small stealth dinners with selective guests,” he said, adding that the demonstrators outside the conference were the only ones who had taken the “red pill” that allowed them to see the reality.

It seemed many of the other delegations from developing countries were not willing to take the “red” pill. Whilst many delegates expressed frustration at the Copenhagen accord for failing utterly to meet the challenge posed by climate change, very few in the final plenary stood up to actually oppose the agreement. The most painful speech I heard was by the President of the Maldives Islands who admitted that they had got none of their demands by attending the small meeting of the large polluting nations, yet pleaded desperately to everyone to agree to the deal as the only option on the table. It is a question that should never be asked of anyone but is a damning indictment of our world's leaders: What would you do if your country is going to disappear because of climate change? Accept a deal that will do nothing to stop its disappearance but at least talks of taking action or reject it as a moral outrage and demand a just deal?

Putting a more radical critique on the agenda

Despite the flawed process, however, Bolivia's delegation remained tireless in pushing a more radical critique of global climate policies as well as putting forward innovative proposals. Bolivia's strong stance on climate change is firstly informed by the effects it is already feeling as a result of climate change with disappearing glaciers and water shortages in the mountainous regions and more regular flooding in the Amazonian region. In June 2005, I visited a community whose mini-hydropower scheme had stopped working due to disappearance of glacier melt water and heard concerns from indigenous community members about the changing climate. 2009 saw prolonged droughts in the Altiplano region and increasing water shortages in the impoverished and highly populated city of El Alto.

However Bolivia's position was also closely tied to its integration with social movements working on environmental justice worldwide. Alongside negotiators, Bolivia's delegation included respresentatives of Bolivia's principal indigenous and campesino organisations, such as respected indigenous community leader Don Rafael Quispe who has even held the Bolivian government to account for its actions related to a flawed environmental licence for a copper mine in his region.

These movements have a very clear position on the need for justice to be at the heart of climate policy. This has led Bolivia to take a strong position on climate debt – highlighting the debt industrialised countries owe to developing countries both in terms of emissions (ie the industrialised countries have a duty to radically cut emissions to below zero to allow developing countries equal access to the atmosphere) and an adaptation debt (paying the costs developing countries are burdened with as they deal with climate change effects both in terms of real finance and technology transfer to allow development of renewable energy).

During the climate conference, Bolivia's tireless promotion of the concept led to more than 100 nations supporting the call for rich nations to pay their climate debt. This put US chief negotiator Todd Stern on the defensive in a press conference: "We absolutely recognize our historic role in putting emissions in the atmosphere up there that are there now. But the sense of guilt or culpability or reparations - I just categorically reject that."

Pablo Solon's response was biting: "Admitting responsibility for the climate crisis without taking necessary actions to address it is like someone burning your house and then refusing to pay for it. Even if the fire was not started on purpose, the industrialised countries, through their inaction, have continued to add fuel to the fire." He added: "In Bolivia we are facing a crisis we had no role in causing. Our glaciers dwindle, droughts become ever more common, and water supplies are drying up. Who should address this? To us it seems only right that the polluter should pay, and not the poor."

Bolivia also put the issue of “Rights of Nature” on the table. In a fascinating and packed side-event, Pablo Solon from Bolivia spoke with South African lawyer Cormac Cullinan on the emerging field of earth jurisprudence. It revealed how long-held indigenous values which treat the planet and our environment as Mother Earth is now linking up with cutting-edge international lawyers looking at how nature rights could fundamentally change how we relate to nature and prevent dangerous environmental exploitation. As Pablo Solon argued, Mother Earth rights could cause a revolution in the field of rights in the 21st Century in the way that human rights did in the 20th Century.

In addition to raising issues of rights of nature and climate debt, Bolivia also put forward a proposal for a Climate Justice Tribunal to judge perpetrators of climate damage and also critiqued the use of free market mechanisms for resolving climate change. Bolivia made clear that without changing the economic system that causes climate change, we could never prevent the climate crisis. As Evo Morales put it in his speech to the conference: "After hearing all the presentations, I am very surprised that everyone only talk about effects and not the causes. The cause is capitalism." In a Democracy Now interview, Morales explained that ending capitalism meant "changing economic policies, ending luxury, consumerism. It’s ending ... this searching for living better. Living better is to exploit human beings. It’s plundering natural resources. It’s egoism and individualism. Therefore, in those promises of capitalism, there is no solidarity or complementarity. There’s no reciprocity. So that’s why we’re trying to think about other ways of living lives and living well, not living better."

Throughout the conference, Bolivia's team of negotiators struggled, often in 20 hour days, for these issues, taking both an inspirational lead within the Latin American block of countries belonging to ALBA (Bolivarian Alliance of Latin America) and the broader G77 group of nations. I always had a long list of requests for interviews and Bolivia was keen to communicate its messages to the media – but I also knew how gruelling the negotiators' schedule was. Angelica Navarro, the lead negotiator for Bolivia was both typical of the team and extraordinary in her own right. Even after only sleeping 40 minutes one night, she would still greet me with a tired smile when I cornered her for an interview, and then forcefully and clearly explain Bolivia's position to the BBC, for example, in a way that hit the heart.

One day we came out of a press conference by the Bolivian government on climate debt, I noticed a group of Indian youth singing a song to the tune of Simon and Garfunkel's Homeward Bound. Except they had changed the lyrics:

"Every day they are stalling and they are saying the same old things again,
But one bright country stands apart,
They’re saying things close to my heart,
They’ve got a plan with hope in hand,
They’re saying c’mon, let’s just start...
Bolivia, I wish I was Bolivian...
Just one degree temperature rise,
300 ppm in the skies,
100 per cent emissions down by two thousand forty"

Pablo Solon, who had barely stood still since the conference started, suddenly stopped and listened to the song, emotion etched on his face. He smiled: “They explain Bolivia's position perfectly.” It was profoundly moving to see the spontaneous demonstration of South South solidarity.

Blame game and the way forward

Since the collapse of the talks, the world has erupted into a blame game – some accusing the Danes, others the rich countries, others China. In an Orwellian twist, some have even accused Bolivia of blocking the talks, when countries like Bolivia were leading the call for much more radical action.

UK environment secretary Ed Miliband is one of the figures who said that Bolivia hijacked the negotiations and argued that there must be major reform of the way UN negotiations are done. This was a bizarre accusation given the fact countries like the UK and US systematically blocked Bolivia and G77 proposals, underminined even existing binding agreements, and then stitched up an agreement with a select group of countries. It was blindingly obvious that the only group that hijacked the negotiations were the countries most responsible for causing climate change.

Until the rich countries that have pushed the planet to the edge of climate catastrophe admit their full responsibility and the climate debt they owe the peoples of the South, we will not make progress. Those who say that President Obama, with an offer of just 4% emissions cuts by the largest polluter (per capita) of the atmosphere, came to Copenhagen with a serious offer are deluded.

That is not to say that developing countries like China and India don't also have a responsibility. As TNI fellow and Indian journalist Praful Bidwai has pointed out, there is something grotesque about Indian industrialists with private jets hiding behind the millions of poor in India to justify their consumptive lifestyles. The real divide is not one of countries but of class, with a rich elite throughout the world recklessly living out an unsustainable lifestyle whilst the vast majority try merely to survive in an increasingly fragile planet.

President Evo Morales has proposed a platform that could offer a way past this impasse. As the conference concluded, Morales said: “As there are no agreements and there remain such profound ideological differences on the best way to confront the threats that threaten the world, it will be important that peoples mobilise and decide the policies that need to be developed.” Specifically he proposed a global referendum, asking the public whether vast sums spent on the military should be invested instead in conserving the planet. He has also convoked an international peoples conference on climate change in April 2010 in Bolivia to put forward an alternative popular programme for tackling the climate crisis.

Immense expectation was placed by many movements and peoples around the world on the Copenhagen conference. Yet we saw that not only did it fail, but it also clearly operated in a way that prevented a just and effective outcome. By comparison, what does seem to be working in actually stopping ever increasing carbon emissions are the countless movements stopping carbon emissions via diverse means from blocking coal power stations in the US, fighting mono-cultural plantations in Brazil and Indonesia, along with communities modelling shifts to low-carbon use such as Transition Towns in Britain. There are also millions of people already living sustainable lives throughout the world that we should emulate. Morales is right: we can't rely on political leaders to tackle the most serious crisis humanity has faced. It is down to us.

UN undermined by G20

2009-06-29T18:10:56-07:00

Here is a blog I wrote for the San Francisco Bay Guardian after attending the UN Conference on the Global Economic Crisis in New York last week....

Maybe I was being a naïve activist, but I thought I would be covering an important and consequential event. The world is facing a devastating economic crisis, accompanied by a toxic mix of crises of climate chaos, food prices and even flu outbreaks, so surely the world's eyes would be on the UN as 192 nations gathered this week to supposedly develop a smart, effective response to these pressing and interconnected issues.

Yet, here I am on the second day of the UN conference on the Global Economic Crisis and its Impact on the development, and for the press it is as if the meeting did not exist. Until Michael Jackson’s death, the latest dull exploits of US celebrity misfits Jon and Kate - famous mainly for their ability to reproduce- were the only stories staring out at me on most front pages.

So I decided to do some investigation. Perhaps it’s just the nature of the United Nations. It certainly doesn’t have a great reputation for effective and efficient responses to crises. The labyrinth of corridors and tired-looking peeled-paint walls seem to be a good metaphor for the UN’s reputation as a bureaucratic institution that had its heydays several decades ago. At times in my vain attempts to find the press room, I became convinced that I would, along the lines of the surreal John Malkovich film, find the 7th and a half floor in Secretary General Ban Ki Moon’s brain.

Yet it was also clear that there is still no other institution that can tackle the global crisis. Whilst it might have started in Wall Street, the crisis is only starting to be felt in places like Nairobi or Jakarta. The World Bank this week said the crisis would be deeper than expected with more than 1 billion people pushed into hunger into 2009. Martin Khor of the South Center reported that many financial ministers of developing countries are desperate. They face plummeting trade and investment incomes and rising costs and exports of capital. But they dare not say how bad the situation because that would guarantee financial meltdown.

It is not just that the crisis has had global impacts. It is also undeniable that despite its flaws, the UN made up of 192 countries has a lot more legitimacy than the self-appointed G20 group of nations who have unilaterally appointed themselves as the global crisis repairmen. As the charismatic President Correa of Ecuador put it in one of the main forums: “How can the G20 argue that they represent the world? We cannot entrust the authors of the crisis with finding the solution. They created a situation where you could say anything no matter how stupid in support of free movement of capital and it would be accepted.” He argued that the crisis provided the opportunity to develop new ideas and fresh thinking based on the values we want represented in the economy.

It soon became apparent that the real reason why the UN conference has received no attention was exactly because of the difficult questions posed by people such as Correa. In fact it turns out that industrialised countries like the US, European Union, Japan and others systematically blocked the conference firstly by trying to ignore it, then by smearing some of their opponents, and finally by outright opposing any demands that threatened any real change.
The international press has been happy to follow the priorities set by the rich country governments - and have consequently ignored the conference's existence.

Miguel D’Escoto Brockmann, the avuncular Nicaraguan priest and elected President of the General Assembly of the United Nations received the brunt of attacks. Brockmann had dared to inject huge energy into the process by pulling together a high level UN commission chaired by Nobel Prize heavyweight Joseph Stiglitz and calling for radical changes in the institutions and rules that led to the crisis. Western diplomats were soon briefing journalists that Brockmann was a “radical socialist” trying to impose its vision on the world community.

Then when it became clear that the largest block of countries, the misnamed Group of 77 (in fact made up more than 130 nations) was also pushing forward many of the same ideas, the rich countries played down the importance of the conference and refused to send high-level representation. Finally the rich countries went through the G77 declaration and removed anything that entailed any reform to either the institutions (such as the IMF, World Bank and World Trade Organization) or the international rules and laws that enabled the crisis to spread and deepen. The result was an anaemic final UN document that does little to tackle the root causes of the financial crisis.

The breaking news this week that staff at Goldman Sachs bank look likely to receive the biggest bonus payouts in the firm's 140-year history typifies the desire by rich countries to return to the pre-crisis world of bumper profits and deregulated chaos. Meanwhile across the US, unemployment, budget cuts are causing ever more economic and social distress. Most analysts say that even if economic growth recovers it will take several years before employment catches up. Moreover if necessary changes are not made to the system that created the crisis, it will almost certainly reoccur.

“We cannot allow business to continue as usual. Those most affected by the crisis must have a voice in how it is resolved,” concluded D’Escoto Brockmann. “The poor is tired of financing the rich and paying for their excesses. We need a new vision that involves the whole community, that expresses what we want this world to be and to look like.” His voice was echoed by community organizer Tanya Dawkins of Miami who said “These fights are about power –and the need to shift power back to where it belongs, with the people.”

Why are top Democrats shielding Goni?

2009-04-11T11:45:32-07:00

I have had the following post published in the weekly, the San Francisco Bay Guardian. My final edits didn't get through into the final piece so if you want to use it, please use the version below.

Top Democratic Party pollster Stanley Greenberg rolled into San Francisco last month to promote his latest book, Dispatches from the War Room – In the trenches with five extraordinary leaders (2009, St. Martin’s Press). The slight, bespectacled man spoke at the Commonwealth Club, sharing what he hoped were “honest and frank” accounts of working with leaders such as Nelson Mandela and Bill Clinton.

While he happily pontificated on the lessons these experiences held for President Barack Obama, he was a bit more defensive on why he had proudly featured in the book Gonzalo “Goni” Sanchez de Lozada, former President of Bolivia who is currently wanted for his role in a massacre of 67 people in October 2003.

Greenberg was drafted in 2002 to help Goni, a Chicago-educated and wealthy businessman, get elected president during a time of social upheaval created largely by U.S.-backed "free market" economic policies (known as neoliberalism). Branding Goni as the only man who could “resolve the crisis,” Greenberg and other US political consultants helped their client scrape an electoral victory with just 23 percent of the popular vote.

The deaths took place less than a year later when Goni announced deeply unpopular plans to give foreign corporations more control over Bolivia’s natural gas resources. Road blockades erected by protesters in the poorest neighbourhoods of the high altitude city of El Alto effectively cut off supplies. Goni signed a decree that instructed the army to clear the roads and promised “indemnification for any damage to property and persons which might occur.” That effective carte blanche resulted in the army shooting live ammunition indiscriminately at men, women and children.

Military repression brought to a head one of the country’s bloodiest years, in which more than 100 people died in social protests. Rising popular anger led Goni to flee the country to exile in the US. He has since lived comfortably in Chevy Chase, Maryland protected by Republicans and Democrats alike.

Greenberg admits in the book that the violence caused him “to take stock,” yet he ends up saying he is now “more certain of my course and his [Goni’s].” He concludes: “I am proud of what we did to help Goni become President.” From the podium at the Commonwealth Club, he blamed the atrocities on the supposed “parallel violence” by the unarmed protestors.

It seems a surprising conclusion for a man who is supposedly in-touch with the electorate. Goni is reviled by most Bolivians as a corrupt and arrogant politician who devalued human life. Even Goni’s Vice President Carlos Mesa denounced him and swore that he would never use violence to enforce policies. Two-thirds of Bolivia’s Congress – including many who had formed part of Goni’s coalition – approved a trial seeking responsibility for the massacres. Disgust at Goni’s neoliberal economic and social policies, which had increased poverty and inequality, was partly behind the landslide 2005 electoral victory of one of the leaders of Bolivia's many social movements, Evo Morales.

Yet sadly Greenberg’s positive spin of Goni seems to be a view that is widely shared with the Democratic Party. At a Washington launch event for Greenberg’s book, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi also appeared to hold Goni in high esteem, warmly welcoming Goni to the event, calling him a “very special man.” Goni’s former defense lawyer, Gregory Craig, is now Obama’s White House Counsel. The Democrats’ historic loyalty to one of their favored pro-American friends seems to outweigh their commitment to human rights and fair legal process.

Rogelio Mayta, the resolute lawyer representing the families whose loved ones were killed in October 2003, tries to give Pelosi the benefit of the doubt: “We want to believe in the good faith of…Pelosi and believe that these praises are due to misinformation rather than a concrete line of action and thinking by the US government.”

Yet the anger of Eloy Rojas, who lost his eight-year-old daughter when troops entered his village and started shooting indiscriminately, is harder to hide. “Every effort that allies of Sanchez de Lozada make to present the ex-President as a victim and an honest man is for us an offense. It is an offense against the pain and suffering that his terrible actions had for our lives. His determination to defend his and other peoples’ economic interests meant that he stopped valuing peoples’ lives...That is why we continue to seek justice.”

In March, Bolivian families who lost loved ones marked a significant milestone in their struggle to end the legacy of impunity for political elites like Goni. After five years of navigating political games and legal loopholes, a date was set for the trial of responsibility for Goni and seven of his ministers. Yet the main defendant, Goni, will be missing as the US government has ignored requests for extradition for several years.

Many in the US and worldwide continue to hope that Obama’s inauguration will mark a new chapter in relations worldwide, especially in Latin America, where there has been a new wave of resistance against US attempts to impose its economic interests. Obama has made some important first steps in ordering closure of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility and re-invigorating the use of diplomacy in regions such as the Middle East. But if he really wants to start a new chapter of international relations rooted in human rights, he doesn’t need to travel abroad. He just needs to respond to Bolivia’s lawful request for extradition and send home the man that lives just seven miles from the White House.

Piracy and the digital revolution

2009-03-26T12:09:33-07:00

I have written the following piece for Red Pepper and the Networked Politics project of the Transnational Institute. The latest on the trial which the article covers can be seen on Wired Magazine's blog.

There isn’t an eye patch or hook in sight, but three young computer geeks and a businessman have recently made piracy very sexy in Sweden. The four founders of a popular file-sharing service called Pirate Bay, become instant underdog cyber-heroes as they took the stand in court in February 2009 against US media giants such as Sony and Warner Brothers. The four potentially face up to two years in prison and fines of up to $180,000 dollars if they are found guilty of infringement of copyright laws.

Cross and bone flags flutter outside the court, every utterance is blogged and twittered and new members are flooding to a Pirate political party that has overtaken the Green Party in terms of members. The contentious file-sharing website – www.piratebay.org – continues to taunt the music industry reps with insults and the spectre of lost profits as an estimated 22 million users swap files from U2’s latest album to Oscar-winning films like Slum Dog Millionaire.

The music and film industry is keen to change the image of the Pirate Bay from one of cyber freedom fighters to one of businessmen (albeit ones with unusual facial hair) profiting at the expense of artists. Monique Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representative in Sweden calls it simply theft: “It’s not a political trial or shutting down a people’s library or one that wants to prohibit file sharing as a technique. It’s a trial regarding four individuals that have conducted a big commercial business, making money out of others by file sharing works – copy protected works, movies and hit music, popular computer games, etc.”

Former IT entrepreneur and founder of the Pirate Party, Rickard Falkvinge sees it differently: “The problem is that politicians have chosen not to listen to young people. We have this new technology and culture of file sharing, but the politicians have chosen to criminalise us. The music industry is doing everything to prevent the spread of culture. In Sweden we are putting a flag in the ground and uniting to put an end to their lobbying.”

Students for free culture

Sweden isn’t the only place where flags are being put in the ground. A few months previously and across the globe, the Students for Free Culture held their first national meeting in December 2008 in Berkeley. They chose to hold the meeting at the US university, which became renowned for the launch of Free Speech movement and a subsequent wave of activism in the 1960s.

Students for Free Culture was started by two students in Pennsylvania who received legal threats in 2003 from an electronic voting manufacturer Diebold for publishing embarrassing internal company emails that revealed serious technical flaws in their voting systems. These machines were used in the controversial elections in Florida in 2000.

Rather than backing down, the students organised to get the emails published on even more websites and counter-sued the company for abuse of copyright law. Political and media attention forced Diebold to announce it would no longer try and stop distribution of the memos. The students hope to launch a movement that has similar impact to the Free Speech Movement.

“Like the Free Speech movement, we are fighting against the top-down control of speech and are motivated by beliefs about basic rights. The differences are in our ability to organize electronically- our Mario Savio [one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement] is more likely to inspire with a blog post than with a speech,” says Berkeley student Alex Kozak, one of the organisers.

The national meeting at Berkeley (titled an “unconference”) committed itself to fight for open access to university research, the use of free and open software within universities, and free licensing of any university patents related to health or software. It also promised to continue to pick fights with any attempts to control the open nature of the Internet and to take head on corporations who try to quash artistic creativity and free speech with lawsuits. (See http://barbieinablender.org/!)

Mayo Fuster Morell, a Catalan activist and researcher on digital issues, believes that “the movement has a high level of commitment and clear ideas. It is not possible to reverse what they want to do. The goal of universal access to knowledge is hugely motivating and linked with other social movements will have a huge impact.”

Internet culture

Throughout the world, the experience of “growing up digital,” as technology writer Don Tapscott has called it, has created a pattern of behaviour and cooperation that, largely unconsciously, undermines corporate control of culture, information and ideas.

“It is part of the identity of my generation to create and share content on large social networks, organise events online, and share with each other our favourite music and movies, sometimes legally and sometimes not,” says Alex. “This behaviour has lead to an unconscious dedication to the culture of sharing.”

Sharing albums via the Internet or in person, editing music and TV footage for Youtube videos or mixing tracks to produce their own music is part of the everyday experience of most teenagers. The Internet has also facilitated the emergence of communities who have the tools to collaborate across borders and produce software, music and films that previously could only be done by resource-rich corporations. This has led to a burgeoning movement of free software and open source technicians, independent media activists and creative artists and writers who openly and freely share their works.

Certainly not all elements of this burgeoning movement are political or progressive. Libertarian attitudes are just as likely (perhaps more likely) to be found on the Right than the Left. Nevertheless, it is clear that the experience of growing up digital is starting to politicise young people who find pride in the collaborative models that they are developing and are determined to defend it where it is threatened.

Corporate backlash

Inadvertently, corporations are supporting this politicisation by their desperate attempts to limit the culture of sharing. In addition to its frequent actions to close down file-sharing sites such as Pirate Bay (and famously before that Napster), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) in the last five years has sued more than 30,000 randomly selected North American families for music file sharing.

And these legal actions are likely to continue. As corporations’ possibilities for increasing profit diminish at a time of recession and against a systemic capitalist tendency for overproduction, patents are one of the few mechanisms that insulate companies from competition and keep prices for branded products (such as music albums or Microsoft software) high.

The entertainment and cultural industry is one of the largest and most profitable industry in the developed world, especially in the US and Japan. Four companies control 70% of the world’s music market. Copyright industries in the US have typically outperformed other industries, contributing as much as 23.78% of overall economic growth in 2007. These corporations usually don’t produce the content and tend not to employ creative producers directly, but rather identify and invest in a small number of artists who can create the most value. They concentrate on licensing and maintaining the maximum length of control of the intellectual property and exercising these rights in as many arenas as possible (film, TV, DVDs, merchandise).

Corporations are not willing to let go of this control easily. Apart from legal threats, companies benefit from the largely corporate control of access to the Internet and via agreements with popular websites like Youtube and Google. In January 2009, they pressurised the first Internet Service Provider, Eircom in Ireland to block access to all file-sharing content and undoubtedly hope to pressure other ISPs to do the same.

They have backed this up with pressure to change the law in many countries. Where they don’t have sufficient influence on politicians domestically, they have used the arsenal of regional free trade agreements and even blunt diplomatic threats to impose stricter Intellectual Property regimes and to target file-sharing sites. The first attempt to close down Pirate Bay in 2006, in which Swedish police confiscated servers, took place after threats from the US embassy against the Swedish government. Mark Getty, chairman of Getty Images, one of the largest owners of copyrighted materials famously said: “Intellectual Property is the Oil of the 21st Century.” Digital activists took this to mean that corporations and countries, like the US and Britain, would also be willing to go to war to protect and control it.

Losing control

But despite their best efforts, there is a sense that the corporations this time will have an impossible task in trying to put free culture back into a safe pre-digital box. Felix Stalder, media researcher at Zurich University says: “I think the war on piracy is failing for social reasons. People like to communicate, to share things, to transform things and technology makes it so easy that there is no way of stopping it.”

Pirate Party’s Richard Falkvinge compares the struggle to the attempts by the Church to control information and culture in the Middle Ages: “We are seeing the same struggle today. Fifteen years ago we had one source communicating to the many, like a newspaper or TV station. Today however with the internet, millions of people are exchanging culture and information on the Internet, so there is no way of controlling this information."

Pirate Bay’s founders have said that regardless of the trial’s outcome that Pirate Bay will continue to exist as it is now set up on distributed servers across the world so that even the owners don’t know where they are. Getty Images was notably sold in 2008 after its stock prices plunged with the rapid rise of cheaper and open-access images on the web. In January 2009, Apple announced it would remove anti-copying restrictions (known as Digital Rights Management) on all of the songs in its popular iTunes Store.

Most significant, perhaps, are the strong alternatives and new models of knowledge sharing that are emerging as cracks appear in the weakening structure of Intellectual Property. In the digital world, Free and Open Source software, such as the Firefox browser and Open Office are taking off as alternatives to Microsoft. The collaborative and free-to-use internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia has emerged as the fourth most popular website on the Internet (after Google, Yahoo and MSN). Increasing number of projects are now carried out collectively and collaboratively across the Internet with limited hierarchical direction and without proprietorial control of the end product.

In the entertainment sphere, bands like Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have shown that bypassing corporate media companies by allowing people to pay what they want to download an album can still ensure artists get rewarded for their creative work. Creativity shows no signs of being squashed by the decline in profits of companies like Sony music: 130 million works by writers, photographers, and film producers have been assigned with Creative Commons licences, designed to make it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others.

German activist Sebastian Lütgert from Pirate Cinema believes that: “What we are witnessing is the coming of producers rather than consumers, and that suggests a new economic model for society.” In practical terms, San Francisco University researcher Dorothy Kidd notes that “the open source software movement offers a good model for how decentralised network structures can work. It is an example that contradicts the ideology that says that public institutions are not flexible and dynamic enough to work.” She believes that these practices need to be incorporated into social movements’ practices and their articulation of alternatives.

There will be challenges in doing this – and it is important not to over-romanticise movements like the Free and Open Source Software movements. Jeff Juris, an analyst on new media technologies and social movements says: “Open source movements can still replicate hierarchies seen in traditional systems. This time the divisions are not just around the usual issues of power and money, but also based on a divide between “tecchies” and activists.” Others note that open source models and corporate power are not mutually exclusive, citing the prominent role of IT company SUNS in projects like the Firefox browser. Collaborative models have the potential to flatten structures of hierarchy and weaken corporate power but this still requires a firm political commitment from the participants.

In an interview by digital magazine Wired with one of Pirate Bay’s collaborators, Pete (surname undisclosed) tells the reporter: “It's not the problem of the pirates to figure out how to compensate artists or encourage invention away from the current intellectual property system... Our job is just to tear down the flawed system that exists, to force the hand of society to make something better.” Therein lies the challenge for social movements and activists to take the redefinition of piracy a stage further – to turn the image of a pirate from an eye-patched destroyer to one of a digitally-inspired pioneer determined to use creativity to build new collaborative and just economic and social models of living.

This article is based on conversations, papers and webpage links and resources pulled together by participants of the Networked Politics and Technology seminar held at Berkeley University, 5-6 December 2008.
>Coverage of the trial on Wired Magazine
>Steal this film - good intro to the issue and for this article
>http://www.networked-politics.info/berkeley/

Bolivia's new constitution

2009-02-06T17:25:14-08:00

I have had the following piece published for TNI on the approval of Bolivia's new constitution. The photo is by Ben Dangl of upsidedownworld which has some good coverage of the build-up to and the day of the referendum.

On 25 January, three days before the world’s business and political elites gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, a very different crowd was forming in the Andean capital of Bolivia. Whilst Davos’ leaders appeared bereft and lost at the failure of their prized economic model, Bolivians danced to mark its defeat. The occasion was the celebration of the country’s new constitution, which in its opening words “puts behind us the colonial, republican and neoliberal state” and which commits itself to building a state “based on principles of sovereignty, dignity, complementarity, solidarity, harmony and equal distribution and redistribution of social goods.”

Against a barrage of opposition media propaganda funded by Bolivia’s elites, the new constitution was approved with 61% of the popular vote. Given the extent of the financial crisis in the US and Europe, the clear lack of popular confidence in Bolivia in the free market model is unlikely to have ruffled many feathers, but it is none the less very significant. Bolivia was once the prized pupil for its wholesale application of policies encouraged by the IMF and the World Bank. Now it is one of the countries articulating an alternative.

Post neoliberal constitution

This is evident in the 100-page document which rejects the dominance of private capital and reasserts the role of the state in the economy. All of Bolivia’s natural resources such as gas and oil are declared the patrimony of the state, with the state given the unique right to administer strategic resources and to run basic services such as electricity and water. Private monopolies of goods and services are forbidden, and the state is required instead to develop policies directed towards reducing social inequalities, focused on the domestic market and favouring small-scale farmers and micro-industries.

At a time when monolithic systems (whether US empire or capitalism) are under increasing challenge, and in recognition of a re-assertive indigenous identity in the Americas, the constitution also declares Bolivia a pluri-national state. This means it recognises the 36 indigenous nations and languages that make up Bolivia, and the right of indigenous communities in their territories to run their own judicial, health, educational and communication systems and to exercise distinct forms of communitarian democracy. Moreover, the constitution commits to making key indigenous values such as “living well” (idea of living justly with neighbours and in harmony with the planet) integral to the country’s identity and therefore promoted in all its institutions and policies.

In addition, the constitution picks up on many demands at the forefront of social movement campaigning in the last decade: the prohibition of foreign military bases on Bolivian soil, the recognition of household work as an economic activity, the wide and full recognition of political, social, economic and cultural rights, the rejection of trade agreements that endanger peasant producers or small businesses.

Heavy costs

Nevertheless, the struggle that Bolivia’s social movements have been through to get to this stage has been very costly. It was in 1990, that a group of indigenous marchers from the east of the country first put forward the demand for a new constitution that would properly recognise Bolivia’s ethnic and cultural diversity. It took many years of persistent protest and enduring brutal repression, and then the hard graft of debating and discussing proposals in countless meetings, for the new constitution to take shape. Morales’ successful election in December 2005 was strongly tied to his firm commitment to facilitate a constituent assembly that would reshape Bolivia.

Morales’ victory gave new energy to social movements, but sparked even fiercer resistance. The last three years have witnessed a constant barrage of attacks led by a landowning and business elite who are mainly based in the eastern lowland regions of Bolivia. Manipulating regional sentiment, racism and fear of centralised government (along with the usual bogeymen of communism and Venezuelan interference), they have created enough popular support to stall any government attempts at structural reform. They have backed this up with the use of ‘shock’ troops of young men who have attacked the constitutional assembly itself, government institutions, social movement leaders, and indigenous people in general. In one such attack, during September 2008, a group of henchmen linked to the governor of the northern province of Pando killed more than 30 campesino farmers.

Whilst the MAS government has frequently shown that it has popular backing at the ballot box (winning four electoral victories so far), the Right’s attacks have been sufficiently destabilising to make it very difficult for the government to advance its agenda. It proved impossible for some of the ministries, in particular the vice-ministry of land, to do their work in some regions of the country. Legislation was constantly blocked in the opposition-controlled senate. At times the threat of civil war seemed a frightening possibility to many Bolivians.

Compromised document

Against this background, in October 2008, the government agreed to over 100 changes to the constitutional document to enable it to pass the Senate. This included changes such as agreeing that land size restrictions would not be applied retroactively, the dropping of an overall prohibition on genetically modified organisms, allowing mixed public-private companies to be involved in service provision, and weakening the rights of indigenous communities to completely block exploitation of resources within their territories.

This angered many on the radical and indigenous left. “This constitution is the definition of vagueness and surrender,” said Pedro Portugal of the newspaper Pukara. Social movements, including those supportive of MAS, expressed concern that the government’s negotiated compromises with the opposition had made land reform proposals meaningless. The government’s valiant efforts to avoid violence and negotiate compromises can be seen by their bases as betrayal of their promise to deliver radical change.

Yet even the watered down constitution proved too much for many of Bolivia’s elites, who continued to campaign against it. Even after the vote, Ruben Costas, the governor of Santa Cruz is calling the results a “draw” as four out of Bolivia’s nine provinces had voted against the constitution. He warned of “unyielding resistance”. Branco Marinkovich, a food industry tsar and implacable opponent of Evo Morales, blamed the results on fraud and Venezuelan interference and said that the country needed a two-state solution, rather like the Hong Kong-China arrangement. The opposition still has plenty of tools for disruption.

Building a new hegemony

Against this bitter opposition, Bolivia’s government now has to develop the laws, and entrench the authority of the constitution – in other words create a hegemony for the ideas, visions and principles within the constitution. This will be a struggle that will take place in congress, in the courts, on the media waves and on the streets. Leny Olivera, a student activist in Cochabamba, says: “We have learnt that changing laws is not enough, we need to change people’s minds and attitudes and this is a long process.”

For the MAS government, it will be critical to start to winning this battle in the four regions (Santa Cruz, Pando, Beni and Tarija) where the majority voted against the constitution. This will be difficult as these regions are tightly controlled by the opposition. Whilst opposition leaders are unable to articulate an alternative national vision, they are clearly determined, at least, to ensure that the new constitution is not applied within their regions.

Yet the fact that more than 30% of citizens in these regions have consistently voted for the process of change, in an atmosphere of fear and intolerance, suggests that the Right’s support is not as solid as they purport. In addition, the 80% of the population who voted in favour of restricting land ownership to a maximum of 5000 hectares (50 square kilometres) shows that, aside from party polarisations, that there is a broad spread support across the whole country for redistribution of land and wealth.

Ongoing struggle

Ultimately, the lesson of the constitutional vote is that documents and institutions alone won’t bring about lasting change. A stalwart leader of social movements, like Evo Morales, knows that, as do many in the social movements that back him, frequently referring to the more than five hundred years of struggle that still inspire today’s struggles.

Oscar Olivera, who helped lead the water war in Cochabamba that threw out multinational Bechtel and a strong critic of the government from the left, says: “The yes vote won, which could have been predicted, but this doesn’t mean that there is one box in which we can find the solutions to our sufferings and therefore create wellbeing. The YES must be understood as the possibility, still, of using this space as a way of continuing to reflect, to think, to struggle, to continue hoping, believing, living in order to create by our own means the life we want, that we have longed for with such passion, as we marched to La Paz, or from San Sebastian, or when we took over factories, and led strikes.” In Bolivia, the struggle for economic and social justice is far from over.

Water birth

2008-10-28T20:33:05-07:00

I am happy to announce the safe arrival of Sumaya Elyse Buxton, born on 18 October 2008. Click on the photo for a gallery of some images. Below are some words that the birth inspired me to write:

Water Birth

For Sumaya Elyse Buxton

I sit like a fisherman expectant,
Gazing at her rose-pink surface,
Which quivers, ripples out,
One arm flickers, a faint egret cry,
Her body returns to stillness.

I see mirrored reflections
Of the eddying
That rolled across Juliette’s watery womb.
Our attempts then at imagined connection
Touching limbs through gossamer-thin skin.

Through a canal of a few inches
Her and our world turned inside out.
The ghostly black-white of ultrasound
Exposed in raw light into
The flushed-red of a perfectly detailed being.

Our imaginings have become the
Reality of nurturing new and vulnerable life.
We have become extensions of her reflexes,
Reacting instinctively
To the crumpling and softening of her face.
Future and past reduced to the present moment.

On my first outing
I find myself walking,
Sumaya cocooned in my sling,
To a nearby nature reserve.
Autumnal dusk feathers the sky,
Flocks of geese arc so close,
Their wings compress the air around us.
We look out at the water’s edge
Squinting towards a shared future.

28 October 2008

Environmentalism: Last nail in the miners' coffin?

2008-09-26T12:07:54-07:00

This post is a bit old because it was waiting to be published elsewhere which didn't happen so am posting it here. Its relevance about not forgetting the workers as we fight against fossil fuels has relevance though for future struggles. The slightly "cheesy" slogan on my partner's pregnant belly with the coal power plant behind (which featured in the Guardian newspaper) links through to a gallery of my photos from climate camp. You can also see more including a piece that Juliette published on Yes Magazine.

I was barely out of primary school, let alone politically conscious, but images of police clashing with miners in the mid-80s still ricochet in my head. The images have been reinforced more recently by films such as “Brassed off” that gave an insight into the way Thatcher’s war on the miners divided and destroyed strong working class communities and culture.

If I had been ten years older in 1984, there is no doubt I would have been on the side of the miners. Yet as we approach the 25 year anniversary of the miner’s strike, I have joined the growing movement of activists who are calling for “No New Coal” and want to see coal power stations shut down to stop climate chaos. The contradiction has sat with me ever since deciding to go down to Climate Camp last week – and was brought to fore by the arrival of the renowned trade union fighter Arthur Scargill at the camp on Monday.

There is no doubt to me that climate chaos is the biggest issue and challenge we face as humanity. Not only because of the way it will destroy our environment and so much of our biological diversity, but because it will adversely affect the impoverished and vulnerable in an already-deeply unequal world. I have seen the impact in Bolivia (where I have lived for the last four years) with unprecedented flooding in two consecutive years and glaciers melting year on year that will soon cause water shortages in the capital city La Paz. Unless it is radically and boldly tackled now, I fear that the world will become increasingly repressive as states use fear and authoritarian control to deal with the conflict and crises that will result from climate chaos.

The thought that the UK government, which admits the threat of climate change, is backing the building of seven coal power stations doesn’t just seem stupid or short-sighted, but utterly reckless and morally abhorrent. Kingsnorth alone will produce more carbon than Costa Rica or Ghana and will release as much CO2 as has been saved in the UK by every wind turbine built to date.

Yet, I also couldn’t help reflecting that the fight against coal is yet another nail in the coffin of the National Union of Miners (down to 4,000 miners from 180,000 in the early 1980s). This time from an emerging social movement dedicated to direct action against UK corporate-led responses to climate change. NUM produced a bulletin especially for the camp in which they stated “many in the Camp couldn’t care less about the impact of utterly exterminating the coal communities and coal power along with the rail freight industry which rests upon them.”

The National Union of Mineworkers proposes that the plants should be built with Carbon Capture Storage technology (which involves pumping carbon emissions into underground reservoirs to prevent release into the atmosphere). CCS has been used by the government as an excuse for giving the go-ahead to the plant even though the untested technology will only apply to about a fifth of its emissions. If the technology doesn’t work, the energy minister has admitted that the plant will continue for at least 40 years to pump vast amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. With the other power stations it would make a complete nonsense of our own attempts to reduce carbon emissions.

I have strong doubts about the potential for CCS as quick technology fixes, after the initial hype, often start to show their failings (agrofuels being just one such example). It is also likely to be an excuse for expanding oil and gas extraction as they will claim that the reservoirs can be later used for carbon capture at exactly the moment that we need a wholesale shift to renewable energy. It certainly will distract from the priority of reducing our carbon emissions through a radical reduction of energy use. However I am not against thoroughly investigating CCS as long as it involves setting up a trial intended solely to test CCS and not using it as a fig leaf to cover-up an expansion of coal power plants.

The bigger issue for me is the failure of the environmental movement to properly involve working class communities, whether in regions dependent on fossil fuels or in communities most affected by environmental pollution. The NUM publication, the Miner put it bluntly: “Where is the programme for these workers?.. Where is the perspective being offered to coal miners, power workers and the beleaguered coal communities of Britain now wracked with poverty, benefit dependency and drug addiction and loss of vision? What was the class perspective being offered? Where were the politics? Frankly there were none.”

This criticism was a bit misplaced as there were efforts by activists within the camp to meet with workers involved in the power plant and to discuss these very issues. But even so it is true that too often environmentalists use images of polar bears or glaciers melting to oppose certain industries, without coming up with alternatives for those workers who would suffer from their industries being closed. Is it fair to sacrifice the miners again, this time not for Thatcher but for climate change? We already know that climate change will invariably affect the poorest and most vulnerable first, that those least responsible for the crisis will suffer the most. Shouldn’t these very people be at the heart of articulating responses to climate change, rather than those at the brunt end of solutions dreamt up by middle class NGOs or activists?

This doesn’t just mean that a class and social analysis has to be at the heart of our climate change politics. It is not enough to say that capitalism is the problem or articulate talks about the need for a “just transition” (something many people in the camp were happy to talk about and which I agree with). It means a whole shift in focus and the culture of our activist work to putting issues of class and social exclusion and most importantly directly involving marginalised communities in our campaigns, research, targets and our proposed solutions.

It will mean working with working-class communities involved in the fossil-fuels industry to come up with just alternatives, using examples such as the Lucas Plan in 1976 where workers in an arms factory in Birmingham put forward plans for converting their factory to producing socially useful goods. Interestingly their visionary plans included a focus on developing renewable energies. Perhaps climate camp could have encouraged this with a bigger focus on job alternatives for Kingsnorth power station workers or even better organized some workshops with Kingsnorth workers to look at developing alternatives?

It will mean allying with groups on the front-end of climate change such as people in Grangemouth in Scotland that live next to a polluting BP oil refinery – and allying ourselves with protests often in impoverished areas that are already fighting against environmental contamination.

This could mean changing the language and articulation of our responses. It was noticeable talking to local people in Kingsnorth that the issue of asthma in school children (apparently Kingsnorth has the third highest levels of asthma in Britain) was more of a compelling issue than the unfortunately still abstract idea of climate change. An analysis of what drove people’s sentiments locally may therefore have led less to a focus on the climate then on public health yet still uniting forces against corporations responsible for climate change.

It would also probably mean a willingness to change the culture of the camp. Whilst I enjoyed the camping, music and even the vegan food, it was noticeable how it very much fitted a white hippy, grungy aesthetic. My partner Juliette, who has worked with art and action camps with young black people from Oakland from California said they would have run a mile from a camp like that with its “very white culture.”

She also said the lack of ethnic diversity would have caused huge debates and critiques in the US, reflecting perhaps how the debate around anti-racist organizing is much more developed in US social movements. There the environmental movement has had a much bigger focus on environmental justice, which highlights how communities of colour have been disproportionately placed close to contaminating industries.

In this context, the occasional comments by some participants that we need to be more inclusive missed the point. Rather than expecting others to adapt to a largely white middle class camp and culture, perhaps it is time for the camp to reach out beyond the comfort zones and support the struggles of communities living next to polluting industries. Perhaps the next camp should not set up a new target, but work with communities in a fossil-fuel dependent area or supporting black communities fighting pollution in a British inner city.

As the Miner bulletin put it: “We are part of the struggle to save the planet, not part of the problem.” The challenge for all those such as myself, who were involved in the climate camp, is to turn the talk of a “just transition” into a reality by radically critiquing our methods so those most affected by climate change (either directly or by policies drawn up to tackle it) are at the heart of both of our campaigns and our proposed solutions.

Peace returns but issues unresolved

2008-09-19T11:39:04-07:00

I don't have much time to blog right now, but recommend the following pieces for updates on what has happened recently: Reactionary rampage: the paramilitary massacre in Bolivia by Forrest Hilton, Brewing Civil war in Time Magazine, and the Machine Gun and the Meeting Table in Upside Down World.

Of course these stories are accompanied by personal ones of tragedy that you usually don't hear, except perhaps in countries like Bolivia because of their size. It was brought home to me, the costs of struggle in Bolivia, when I heard news that a friend of a friend lost her cousin in the massacre in Pando. I can only imagine how devastated she is.

There are a huge number of websites and blogs to check up on Bolivia nowadays. But these are some of the English-speaking ones I have been checking recently:

Upside Down World: great site run by a friend Ben Dangl on political developments in Latin America

Abiding in Bolivia: amusing caustic blog attacking the Right in Bolivia and exposing the generally ignorant international press coverage

Missionary Man: Another friend from Cochabamba, who when he writes does good analysis of what is happening

Bolivia Information Forum: Does some good briefings on developments

Machetera: does translations of key articles

Ukhampacha: Tends to be more updated in Spanish than English, but recently there has been a burst of activity on the website

Elite backlash

2008-09-10T16:43:10-07:00

What do you do if you are living in a country where a government looks like taking back thousands of acres of your land (most of which you stole but hey you have been allowed it up to now)? Or perhaps you are a business leader who has proudly had government in your pocket, yet now they pay little attention to you and keep doing things that just don't make "good business sense." Or perhaps you are white and a small minority in a largely indigenous country but have always had members of your family in power, and suddenly the government is taken over by loads of ignorant people who look frighteningly like your sweet housemaid.

Well I guess you might look at changing the national government, but they have received more votes than you ever did, so you opt to take control of local government which is a bit easier. Then you push for more power and autonomy. When the government doesn't look like giving you what you want, still keep their money on the purse strings on which your local power depends, and worse of all threaten to deepen their programme of changes, you start to get desperate. Maybe you decide to organise some strikes, marches, pay bands to write cheesy lyrics about freedom, hope bit by bit you can make the central government's work impossible and that their supporters will start to wane.

Then you have a referendum, and you can't believe how stupid your own countrymen are because they vote in ever larger numbers for the government - even goddamit from your own region. Hey, isnt democracy meant to be on my side? Isn't that what Bush promised? What is one to do?

Well in Bolivia in the last weeks, we have seen exactly what the Right does. Go back to their paid groups of thugs and get them to violently take offices of the Government to create chaos, and if possible some violence and even martyrs if that can get the government out. Because the elites lack subtlety, they also decided to mete out the most violence on the National Land Institute (responsible for land redistribution) and NGOs linked to human rights, indigenous rights and land redistribution - and hey why not, the recently nationalised telecommunications company which somehow is reducing prices and threatening companies which their friends control.

Conflicts always mean a bit more press coverage - although you can be sure it will be more if it is Evo rather than the prefects - but this is where the absence of context as ever leads to strong misreprentation of the power dynamics in Bolivia. If you read any press you will likely hear that the conflicts are the age-old rivalry between the east lowlands and west highlands, that "opposition groups" in the East are opposed to constitutional plans and want more revenue for the region, and of course that Evo Morales is a Leftist close to Chavez.

What they nearly always fail to mention are any of the following facts:

- that the opposition is led by business elites and big landowners who have spent vast amounts of money, tactics of intimidation, and violence to push the message that regional autonomy will improve people'slives
- despite this fierce campaign and the almost complete absence of central government, the opposition's popular support is still limited to the cities whilst the central government's support grows ever more
- that the central government's nationalisation more than doubled the revenues for the Eastern regions
- that the Right who fought the Constitutional Assembly for a year saying everything had to be approved by two-thirds suddenly don't want any further popular votes now that two-thirds backed Evo in a referendum in July

For some more news, I enclose a translation of an article on bolpress below. I also recommend a post on this blog about some of the questions the violence raises for folk on the radical left:

The fascist coup has started in Santa Cruz, denounces the Bolivian government

(Bolpress)

The Bolivian government communicated today to the national and international community that a civil coup has been put into action in the departmental capital city of Santa Cruz, led by the President of the Civic Committee, Branco Marinkovic, and supported by Prefect Ruben Costas. The national government will not respond to “provocations by fascist groups” and will defend democracy and national unity without declaring a state of emergency in the convulsed regions.

The government denounced several times in the last few weeks that there were preparations for violent protests with internal and external support. Today the predicted events materialized and began a “civic prefectural coup against the unity of the country and democracy,” said the government minister Alfredo Rada.

Students and activists of the [neo-fascist] group the Santa Cruz Youth Union (UCJ) and shock groups of thugs paid by the business-led civic movement from Santa Cruz attacked on Tuesday offices of Internal Revenue, the National Institute of Land Reform (INRA) and the National Company of Telecommunications (ENTEL).

The vandals stole computers, televisions, telephone equipment and other public goods, and burnt furniture and documentation. They beat conscripts and police guarding the State properties with sticks. After destroying public entities that had been taken over by the State recently, the fascist groups burnt the offices of the human rights organization, Centre for Juridical and Social Studies (CEJIS). In addition they burnt installations of Radio Patria Nueva, attacked offices of the State television company Channel Seven in Santa Cruz and robbed equipment. They forced Radio Alternativa to suspend broadcasts and intimidated other media that are not aligned to the movement for elite-led autonomy, in scenes reminiscent of the previous week in Cobija, where four radio broadcasters had to stop their work in order to protect the safety of their journalists.

They have installed a type of “regional and civic terrorism in four regional departments in order to take hostage the people’s voice and the free ability to express one’s opinions,” lamented the Presidential Minister Juan Ramon Quintana. The curious fact is that the National Association of Press (ANP), a strong defender of private media, has not said a single word in defense of “freedom of expression” in the light of these events.

The Defence Minister Walker San Miguel praised the restraint of the soldiers and police who faced off vandals “without firing a bullet” even at risk to their own personal security, conscious that the ultra-right are looking for deaths and wounded for political manipulation.

The Minister Rada blamed the events in Santa Cruz on the civic leader Marinkovic and the Prefect Costa, who failed to comply with their basic obligation to guarantee security and peaceful coexistence for its inhabitants and who from the “shadows incite these types of violent acts. These two people incited, promoted and carried out this fascist and racist violence.”

San Miguel revealed that opposition groups planned in the coming hours to take the refinery of Palmasola and interrupt fuel supplies, but the “fascists will not pass.” “What they are attacking essentially is democracy. They want to overthrow the institutional order that has been built with such difficulty, but we will not allow it, as we have popular support,” promised Quintana.

The government will not declare a regional state of emergency, as this extreme constitutional measure will only radicalize further the ultra-right shock groups. Furthermore, the democratic liberties of more than a million inhabitants of Santa Cruz must not be affected by the works of 500 or a thousand thugs, said the Minister San Miguel.

The national government says that confronting criminals and vandals who respond to a terrorist regime shows that they are without political arguments and incapable of debating democratically. The government will use legal and constitutional instruments to stop the fascist civic coup.

The big land and cattle owner and head of the right-wing PODEMOS party benches, Antonio Franco “applauded” the taking of offices in Santa Cruz. The looting was also encouraged by deputy Pablo Klinsky (PODEMOS) who is close to Marinkovic.

“We will not be beaten, if we are talking about confrontations let’s talk about confrontations, if we are going to talk about war, let there be war, but they will not impose anything on us. We are sufficiently strong to split off from the country, and if I have to take a stick, a sling, a gun, I will do it. I will go and defend my territory because no-one will push me around,” warned the PODEMOS deputy from Santa Cruz Oscar Urenda.

Changing lives

2008-09-05T15:26:29-07:00

A boy weaves down a road bordered with neat gardens and pitches a newspaper onto the front lawn of a house. There is a sound of a click and the automated sprinkler system starts up, soaking the newspaper. A middle-aged man pulls out of his driveway. “Bye daddy,” chirrup some girls cutely. Nope, it’s not a scene from a movie. It’s a scene from my new life.

And yes, for those forlorn ten loyal blog readers who have faced months of silence from this blog, it is a bit of a jump from my former existence in Bolivia. I did warn you a few blogs ago, but never had a chance to properly explain myself.

I blame it all on Goethe and a Venezuelan brothel.

Goethe because he captured the truth: "That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.”

And the Venezuelan brothel because that is where I ended up inviting a Californian lass called Juliette to stay with me whilst traveling to the World Social Forum in Caracas, Venezuela in January 2007. How the cheap hotel ended up to be a brothel is another story, but the inauspicious start led to a friendship that blossomed into romance, and which led me to head out to live with Juliette in the countryside outside Cochabamba in 2007.

Where Goethe and the brothel finally came together was in January this year, when I proposed to Juliette and she replied Ari puni ("of course" in Quechua). You know at that moment that your life will never be the same, but I never realized how much it could change so much.

Goethe got it right. Any doubts I had before proposing disappeared as my love for Juliette deepened. And suddenly a whole string of events started unraveling from that first decision. Just as a starter, soon after the decision to marry, Juliette instantly became pregnant. I always knew the Cochabamba valleys were fertile.

And strangely, as my commitment to Juliette bound together, our certainty about being in Bolivia started to unravel. Whilst we treasured much of our time out in the countryside, we had missed some close friends and felt unsettled by our inability to put down roots in terms of a place to live. With the pregnancy, Juliette started to miss her family too, and wondered about our ability to cope with raising our first child in difficult living conditions without the support of family.

Gradually, the unraveling thread led us to decide to give birth to the baby in California and to get married beforehand in Britain.

When we finally voiced the decision in our hearts, we have been on almost a constant transition ever since. Packing and unpacking, farewells and flights, ceremonies and rituals, a lurching between tears and laughter. It was very painful saying goodbye in Bolivia, only softened by the fact that we both hope to return to live at some point with our family in the future.

The power of public ritual helped too: with an amazing Andean blessing by Lake Titicaca that both celebrated our time, friendships and love of Bolivia, and then in the UK, where a wedding accompanied by drums, piñatas, African singing and Bolivian weavings and coca leaves connected our new joint lives with the friendships and family that have nurtured us over more than 30 years.

So here we are, one day after arriving from Britain, living a scene from the Truman Show, in a small leafy University town called Davis in California. Except of course there is no dome or TV show that we plan to stay in. Instead I hope we continue listening to Goethe who after talking about the unforeseen events that happen because of decisions, ended with the famous rallying cry of living life to the full: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now."