CounterVortex

POWER FROM BELOW

Book Review:

MEXICO UNCONQUERED
Chronicles of Power and Revolt
by John Gibler
City Lights Books, San Francisco, 2009

WOBBLIES AND ZAPATISTAS
Conversations on Anarchism, Marxism, and Radical History
by Staughton Lynd and Andrej Grubacic
PM Press, Oakland, 2008

by Bill Weinberg, WIN Magazine

It is welcome to see two new entries at the bookstore on the Zapatistas and related revolutionary movements in Mexico—issues that have slipped from the U.S. headlines even as nightmarish violence escalates with vertiginous rapidity just across the border. Both these books also have something to add to the long debate about armed struggle and how it relates to unarmed, civil popular movements.

John Gibler's Mexico Unconquered is most useful in its first-hand reportage from across a swath of social struggles. Gilber speaks with peasants in impoverished villages of Guerrero and Michoacán, where residents are terrorized by security forces acting under the rubric of drug enforcement. From the U.S. border, he offers a chilling interview with a pollero who smuggles desperate migrants across the line—proffering a perilous desert journey for an exorbitant price. He portrays a lawless society in which the poor are left with the choices of submitting to hunger and humiliation, heading north—or fighting back.

Gibler visits the Zapatista rebel zones in the jungle canyons of Chiapas, where Maya peasants have for 15 years been constructing their own living model of indigenous autonomy—an armed movement which has managed to survive and maintain its turf through political rather than military means.

Two civil movements Gibler focuses on are those at the village of Atenco in central Mexico, which was brutally occupied by police following protests in 2006, and in the southern state of Oaxaca, which saw a popular uprising against a corrupt governor that same year. The Oaxaca movement included marches and sit-ins, but also "throwing rocks at the riot police [and] burning tires at the barricades."

Gibler's most important contribution is his prison interview with Gloria Arenas—"Colonel Aurora" of the Revolutionary Army of the Insurgent People (ERPI). Arenas was arrested in 1999, along with her husband Jacobo Silva Nogales, "Comandante Antonio," charged with leading the guerilla movement in the mountains of Guerrero. She tells how she was politicized in her youth in the Sierra Zongolica of Veracruz, where campesinos faced repression for organizing to defend their lands from rapacious logging operations. The 1998 massacre at Guerrero's El Charco village—where soldiers killed several ERPI militants and civilian sympathizers in a surprise attack on a schoolhouse—is related. And new light is shed on the ERPI's emergence from the more Leninist and doctrinaire Popular Revolutionary Army (EPR).

Arenas cites the Zapatistas' ethic of mandar obedeciendo (command by obeying) as offering a more democratic alternative, in which decision-making power flows up from the base rather then being imposed from above. She also speaks of armed struggle as part of a praxis with civil social movements, resorted to "depending on the circumstances, but not defined by dogma independently of experience." (True to form, the EPR issued orders for Comandante Anotnio's death when he broke away to form the ERPI.)

More theoretical and frankly meandering is Wobblies & Zapatistas, a series of interviews between anarchist scholar Andrej Grubacic and the revered radical historian, conscientious objector and veteran anti-war and civil rights activist Staughton Lynd. The conversation starts out with the Chiapas rebellion and the Industrial Workers of the World—"the Zapatistas of yesteryear," in Lynd's phrase—but makes brief stops with the community organizing efforts of former steelworkers in post-industrial Youngstown, the 1946 general strike in Oakland, the Vietnam-era anti-war movement, and the 1980s revolutionary upsurges of Central America. Lynd ties it all together with his concept of "accompaniment"—basically, throwing one's lot in with the oppressed, sharing the burdens and risks of their struggles.

Grubacic and Lynd are concerned with the potentialities of movements that seek fundamental social change "without taking over the state," drawing from both a Marxist analysis of capitalism's dynamics and an anarchist critique of centralized power. While they are clearly inspired by the Zapatistas, Lynd acknowledges that the Chiapas revolutionaries have fallen short of their ambitions to build a unified movement across Mexico. He also concedes that their intransigent opposition to traditional political parties (even of the left) has been criticized by some Mexican activists and commentators as counter-productive—helping to bring the right to power.

Lynd brings a similarly nuanced analysis to the question of nonviolence, speaking of his personal commitment to the principle and how it developed in the ant-war movement of the 1960s, how he perceives its applicability to many of the struggles discussed—yet without portraying it as an absolute or uniform solution.

Grubacic is from the former Yugoslavia, and inevitably this discussion touches on the question of so-called "humanitarian intervention"—unfortunately occasioning the book's one failure of intellectual honesty. The wording of Grubacic's question is contemptuously dismissive of those who are concerned about Darfur and Tibet, or were concerned about Kosova ten years ago. And Lynd's answer is just as bad, summing up U.S. war aims in the Balkans as "to destroy the last vestiges of public ownership in Serbia," without even mentioning the ethnic cleansing. There may be a case to be made that U.S. war aims were those he depicts, and there is certainly a good case against "humanitarian intervention" as counter-productive hubris. But failure to even acknowledge the atrocities is simply dodging the question. One would hope for words that would encourage solidarity between the Zapatistas and the Bosnians, Kosovars or Tibetans—rather than a glib betrayal of the latter.

Lynd is more honest on the limitations and complexities of nonviolence when he looks into American history. He acknowledges the critical role of the abolitionists—"the strongest nonviolent movement in United States history," at least up to that point. But he also acknowledges that it was the Union army and its merciless war that ultimately destroyed the slave system. "Could slavery have been ended in any other way?" he asks. "Was this humanitarian intervention justified? I do not know the answer."

—-

Bill Weinberg is author of Homage to Chiapas: the New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico (Verso 2000) and editor of the online World War 4 Report.

This review first appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of WIN Magazine, journal of the War Resisters League.

See also:

CHIAPAS: PORTRAIT OF THE RESISTANCE
Autonomy Under Siege in the Zapatista Zones
by Gloria Muñoz Ramírez, CIP Americas Program/La Jornada
World War 4 Report, February 2009

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, December 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution
 

Continue ReadingPOWER FROM BELOW 

WE RESUME PUBLICATION…

Dear readers:

After a three-month hiatus while I was on assignment in South America, World War 4 Report is resuming publication. Response to our Exit Poll asking the readers to weigh in on the value of our project, and whether it should continue, was strongly favorable. And we finally did reach our $2,000 annual fund-raising goal last month. These are encouraging signs.

We will endeavor to stay on a monthly schedule through the winter, while I am working on several projects, including Petro-Imperialism: the Overstretched American Empire and the Struggle for the Planet’s Oil. All those who pledged $25 or more this past year will be receiving a copy.

We will not be having another formal fund drive for six months at least. However, anyone who wishes to encourage us can feel free to make a donation. We are asking all our readers to pitch in to spread the word about World War 4 Report—e.g., by forwarding the mailing for the current issue to those who you think would value our work. Or by giving us a link on your own website.

The Daily Report, which was active only sporadically while I was in Peru, is now being updated each day. Please bookmark it, and feel free to leave comments. Criticism, kudos, corrections and/or annotations are always welcome.

Thank you, shukran and gracias,

Bill Weinberg

Editor, World War 4 Report

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Continue ReadingWE RESUME PUBLICATION… 

NEOLIBERALISM NEEDS DEATH SQUADS IN COLOMBIA

Book Review:
BLOOD AND CAPITAL
The Paramilitarization of Colombia
by Jasmin Hristov
Ohio University Press, 2009

by Hans Bennett, Upside Down World

In her new book Blood & Capital: The Paramilitarization of Colombia, author Jasmin Hristov writes: “For roughly forty years, the Colombian state has been playing a double game: prohibiting the formation of paramilitary groups with one law and facilitating their existence with another; condemning their barbarities and at the same time assisting their operations; promising to bring perpetrators of crime to justice, while opening the door to perpetual immunity; convicting them of narco-trafficking, yet profiting from their drug deals; announcing to the world the government’s persecution of paramilitary organizations, even though in reality these ‘illegal armed groups’ have been carrying out the dirty work unseemly for a state that claims to be democratic and worthy of billions of dollars in US military aid.”

As the largest recipient of US military aid in the hemisphere, Colombia has long been the US’ most important ally in Latin America. Simultaneously, Colombia has also become the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator, with Colombia’s numerous paramilitary organizations recently taking center stage, as they’ve gradually become directly responsible for more human rights atrocities than the formal military and police. In the name of fighting “narco-terrorism,” poor people and dissidents are massacred, assassinated, tortured, and disappeared, among other atrocities—done to eliminate particular individuals and to “set an example” by intimidating others in the community. Ninety-seven percent of human rights abuses remain unpunished.

In recent years, a variety of human rights organizations, as well as mainstream academics and journalists have found it impossible to ignore the astronomical human rights violations. However, even though these groups have accurately reported on the actual atrocities, Jasmin Hristov argues that in their reports, the atrocities are largely de-contextualized from the powerful forces in Colombia and the US that directly benefit from this repression. According to Hristov, this mainstream presentation serves to mask the fact that US and Colombian elites directly support (via funding, training, supervising, and providing legal immunity for) state repression carried out by the police and military, as well as illegal paramilitary groups that are unofficially sanctioned by the government. Whether it is murdering labor organizers or displacing an indigenous community because a US corporation wants to drill for oil on their land, Hristov passionately asserts that death squad violence is purposefully directed towards sectors of society that stand in the way of the ruling class’ efforts to maintain economic dominance and acquire more resources to make even more profit.

In her book, Hristov does make a convincing argument that Colombia’s notorious death squads are inherently linked to maintenance of the country’s extreme economic inequality. Particularly since the neoliberal reforms of the 1990s that have increased poverty, Colombia’s poor continue to resist their oppression in many different ways. In response, state repression on a variety of levels is needed to terrorize unarmed social movements and other community groups and activists.

Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov seeks to expose the rational motivations behind state violence for capitalism’s economic elites in the US and Colombia. In meticulous detail, Hristov shows how the super-rich benefit from state repression and how the violators of human rights have essentially become immune from any consequences for their actions. If death squads are truly to be abolished in Colombia, we must look honestly at how and why they exist today. Hristov’s new book is a powerful tool for exposing who truly calls the shots.

Neoliberalism or Neopoverty?
Hristov asserts that “it is not a mere coincidence that during the era of accelerated neoliberal restructuring, the deterioration in the living conditions of the working majority has been accompanied by an increase in the capabilities and activities of military, police, and paramilitary groups, as well as the portrayal of social movements as forces that must be monitored, silenced, and eventually dismantled.” The scandalous epidemic of poverty in Colombia is key to understanding Colombian politics, and why the upper classes so fear political organizing among the poor, who could mount a formidable opposition to the status quo if allowed to organize unrestrained by state repression.

When neoliberal policies were adopted by the Colombian government in the 1990s, it dramatically increased poverty, and made an already terrible situation worse. Hristov writes that the “essential components of neoliberalism are trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, and austerity. Trade liberalization entails the removal of any trade barriers, such as tariffs and quotas. Privatization requires the sale of public enterprises and assets to private owners. Through the removal of government restrictions and interventions on capital, deregulation allows market forces to act as a self-regulating mechanism… Austerity requires the drastic reduction or elimination of expenditures for social programs and services.”

She argues that the “main cause that led to the official adoption of neoliberal policies by the developing countries in Latin America and elsewhere was the pressure to service their external debts in the late 1970s. In order to receive loans from the World Bank (WB), or the International Monetary Fund (IMF), nations had to agree to a program of structural adjustment that included drastically reducing public spending in health, education, and welfare,” and much more.

Because Colombia had less debt than other Latin American countries, “major neoliberal restructuring did not begin until 1990, under President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo (1990-94), when the country began to receive massive amounts of US military aid… In addition to the significant social damage wrought by these policies, by the mid-1990s Colombia had to almost double its borrowing from the IMF because of the economic crisis brought on by the market liberalization,” writes Hristov.

These drastic reforms have intensified since current President Alvaro Uribe came to power in 2002. After the IMF loaned $2.1 billion in 2003 on the condition that the reforms be accelerated, Uribe “privatized one of the country’s largest banks (BANCAFE), restructured the pension program, and reduced the number of public-sector workers in order to cut budget deficits, as required by the international lending institution. Uribe also closed down some of the country’s biggest public hospitals, eliminating over four thousand medical jobs, and denationalized companies in the telecommunications, oil, and mining sectors,” reports Hristov.

These are a few of the statistics compiled by Hristov, who writes that “in a country of 45 million, around 11 million people are unable to afford even one nutritious meal a day. According to statistics from 2005, 65 percent of Colombians are unable to regularly satisfy basic subsistence needs. In rural areas, the poverty rate is as high as 85 percent… In 2000 it was estimated that half a million children suffer from malnutrition and close to 2.5 million children between the ages of six and seventeen are forced to work… Furthermore, there has been a notable decline in school attendance, literacy, and life expectancy as well as access to child care and education over the past couple of years.”

Blood, Capital, and the State Coercive Apparatus
Throughout Blood & Capital, Hristov details many horrifying ways in which the rich are empowered by violence from what she identifies as the “state’s coercive apparatus” (SCA). She argues that “two intertwining motifs run throughout Colombia’s history: (1) social relations marked by inequality, exploitation, and exclusion and (2) violence employed by those with economic and political power over the working majority and the poor in order to acquire control over resources, forcibly recruit labor, and suppress or eliminate dissent.”

Dating back to the European conquest of the Americas, Hristov asserts that violence has been central to the creation of modern-day Colombia’s government and economy. She writes that “starting in the late 1500s, the conquerors began clearing the indigenous population from territories with desirable characteristics—mineral deposits, fertile soil, access to water, transportation routes, and so on. The separation of the indigenous from their means of subsistence allowed the formation of a local colonial elite who transformed what used to be the native inhabitants communal lands into large estates or haciendas. The creation of landless peasants facilitated the supply of labor for the Spaniards’ ventures, such as mining and agriculture.”

State violence supporting the economic elite continued, but became much worse in the 1960s under the direction of the US military. Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, president of the Colombian Permanent Committee for Human Rights reports that in the 1960s, “during the Kennedy administration,” the US “took great pains to transform our regular armies into counterinsurgency brigades, accepting the new strategy of the death squads.” This “ushered in what is known in Latin America as the National Security Doctrine… not defense against an external enemy, but a way to make the military establishment the masters of the game… the right to combat the internal enemy… this could mean anyone, including human rights activists such as myself.”

As Edward Herman, co-author of The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism explained in a previous interview with Upside Down World, US support for repressive governments in Colombia and throughout Latin America was, and still is, part of a general policy towards third world populations. Focusing largely on US support for the Latin American “National Security States,” Herman and co-author Noam Chomsky argue that US corporations purposefully support (and in many instances create) fascist terror states in order to create a favorable investment climate. In exchange for a cut of the action, local military police-states brutally repress their population when it attempts to assert basic human rights.

In the 1960s, the US and Colombian governments launched Plan Lazo, designed to target the “internal enemy.” Hristov writes that “the military aid that was part of Plan Lazo (and all subsequent programs, including those in place today, such as the Patriot Plan) were given on the condition that Colombian forces would use terror and violence, since these formed a legitimate part of the overall anticommunist offensive. In 1966 the field manual US Army Counterinsurgency Forces specified that while antiguerrilla should not employ mass terror, selective terror against civilians was acceptable and was justified as a necessary response to the alleged terrorism committed by rebel forces.”

Hristov asserts that while the US handled the “financial and ideological aspects” of building and strengthening the SCA, locally the Colombian elites also played a key role. “It implemented many of the policies suggested by the US counterinsurgency manual in order to discipline the civilian population through measures such as press censorship, the suspension of civil rights (to permit arrest on mere suspicion), and the forced relocation of entire villages. President Guillermo Leon Valencia (1962-66) boosted the anticommunist campaign by declaring a state of siege whereby judicial and political powers were transferred to the military while the latter was freed from accountability to civilian authorities for its conduct.”

With US financing and supervision, the Colombian armed forces have since become one of the most renowned human rights violators in the world. This despicable conduct eventually created significant local and international opposition, and under this pressure the SCA has been forced to adjust. In response, the responsibility for repression has shifted more towards paramilitaries, whose activities are officially independent of the government. In this situation, when paramilitaries target the “internal enemy,” the same goal is accomplished as if the government itself did it, yet the government cannot be officially linked to the violence.

The Paramilitarization of Colombia
The size and strength of paramilitary death squads in Colombia has steadily increased since they were first established in the 1960s. According to Hristov, the paramilitaries are now responsible for about 80 percent of human rights violations in Colombia, compared to 16 percent by the rebel guerrillas. The paramilitaries’ evolution, Hristov argues, is the result of “perhaps the most creative and intelligent effort by an elite-dominated state to counteract revolutionary processes… The Colombian parastatal system represents neither a traditional centralized authoritarian regime, as those that existed in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, nor merely a collection of autonomous armed bands dispersed over rural areas, each ruling locally, as in Mexico. What we see in Colombia is a mutated SCA that has assumed a nonstate appearance.”

The function of the paramilitaries in Colombia was explained well by Gilberto Cárdenas, former captain of the national police and former director of the Judicial Police Investigative and Intelligence Unit in the Urabá region. In 2002, testifying against the commander of the 17th Brigade of the Colombian armed forces, Cárdenas told representatives of the United Nations and Colombian authorities that “The paramilitaries were created by the Colombian government itself to do the dirty work, in other words, in order to kill all individuals who, according to the state and the police, are guerrillas. But in order to do that, the [the government] had to create illegal groups so that no one would suspect the government of Colombia and its military forces… members of the army and the police even patrol side by side with the paramilitaries.”

The paramilitary system first began in the mid-1960s when the Colombian government passed legislation that authorized citizens to carry arms and assist the military in repression. Hristov argues that “paramilitary forces entered the scene to perform two main functions.” The first was to participate in combat at a local level, as described by the 1966 US Army Counterinsurgency Forces field manual, which stated: “paramilitary units can support the national army in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations when the latter are being conducted in their own province or political subdivision.” Second, Hristov writes that paramilitaries “were intended to monitor and gather intelligence on the rebels, their civilian supporters, and social organizations by establishing networks throughout the country.”

While these early paramilitaries did play some role in state repression, it would not be until the 1980s that they really began to increase in size and influence. Hristov writes that “the 1980s were the golden age of paramilitary development, as many new groups formed, expanded, and rapidly acquired financial and military strength… This second wave of creation enacted by large-scale landowners, cattle ranchers, mining entrepreneurs (particularly those in the emerald business) and narco-lords took place in a particular context, characterized by five main features: a shift in the state’s (unofficial) policy toward the partial privatization of coercion; the state’s fusion with the elite; a legal framework that had set the ground for the design, training, equipping, and administration by the state military of armed bodies outside its institution; a prevailing anticommunist ideology; and militarized patches of the country that served as models to emulate.”

This second wave was given another boost in 1994 with the creation of the Community Rural Surveillance Associations (CONVIVIR) by current President Alvaro Uribe Vélez, who was the governor of the department of Antioquia at that time. Hristov writes that Uribe made CONVIVIR into “a replica of the original paramilitary bodies designed in the 1960s. As it had thirty years ago, now the civilian counterpart of the SCA was to take on a central role in the Dirty War under a legal mantle. By the time CONVIVIR was outlawed, in 1999, most of the numerous paramilitary self defense bodies had united, attaining an organizational and military capacity unsurpassed by paramilitary forces in any other Latin American country.”

In August, 1998, just before the legislation supporting CONVIVIR was abolished, hundreds of members publicly announced that they would be joining the AUC paramilitary network, which became the most prominent paramilitary network in Colombia. The AUC had been created in 1997, mostly under the leadership of Carlos Castano and his paramilitary group, the ACCU, which became the largest group in the AUC federation. Others that operated in this loose confederation of paramilitary groups included Bloque Cacique Nutibara, the Bloque Central Bolivar, and the Bloque de Magdalena Medio.

Following official “peace negotiations” between the AUC and the Colombian government which began in 2002 with an official AUC ceasefire agreement, the AUC officially disbanded in February 2006, as part of an overall public disarmament of many paramilitaries throughout Colombia. However Hristov argues that “there are many factors challenging the legitimacy of the peace process. First, during the entire period of the cease-fire announced by the AUC, its groups regularly engaged in military actions against civilians, thereby committing human rights violations (and such activities continue to take place). Second, often those who claimed to be demobilizing were not the real paramilitary combatants but hired criminals, or drug dealers who had bought the AUC franchise. Third, large quantities of arms that should have been turned over were not. Fourth, fighters who are officially considered demobilized are in reality already active militarily in new organizations, where their skills of terrorizing the civilian population for economic gains are necessary and valued.”

Since 2006, there have been several government initiatives that give the formal appearance of the Colombian government working to combat paramilitaries. Hristov explains that “early in 2007 the Supreme Court began investigating numerous connections between paramilitaries and important state actors, such as senators, representatives, deputies, councilors, and mayors. As time went by, the public learned of more and more cases in which the legal (state officials with their political authority and legitimacy) and the illegal (paramilitary groups with their economic and military power) had entered into alliances to advance their mutual interests. Through mid-2008, 38 percent of members of Congress have been implicated in this parapolitica scandal.”

While Hristov recognizes some importance in these recent investigations, she feels that their real impact has been extremely limited. She argues that “despite all the cases that have been exposed, parapolitica is not likely to be eradicated from the Colombian political system. On the contrary, the flood of revelations about politicians’ connections to the paramilitary actually allows serious crimes, such as complicity in massacres, to get buried under waves of minor offenses, and eventually the entire issue becomes just another corruption scandal.”

In their 2009 report on Colombia, Human Rights Watch concluded that there are many “threats to accountability for paramilitaries’ accomplices,” reporting that “the Uribe administration has repeatedly taken actions that could sabotage the investigations. Administration officials have issued public personal attacks on the Supreme Court and its members, in some cases making accusations that have turned out to be baseless, in what increasingly looks like a campaign to discredit the court. In mid-2008 the administration proposed a series of constitutional amendments that would have removed what are known as the ‘parapolitics’ investigations from the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction, but it withdrew the proposal in November. The administration also blocked what is known as the ’empty chair’ bill, which would have reformed the Congress to sanction parties that had backed politicians linked to paramilitaries.”

Hristov concludes that the centrality of paramilitaries to Colombian politics will not be disappearing anytime soon, mostly because repression has been necessary to enforce the country’s stark social/political/economic injustice. Hristov argues that the paramilitaries have become an essential tool of repression, and because Colombia’s poor majority will continue to resist this outrageous poverty, the paramilitaries’ repression will continue. Seen in this context, the recent demobilization process is only a tactical restructuring of paramilitaries and the SCA, similar to their restructurings in the 1980s and 1990s. Hristov sees this restructuring as an “adaptation response” to “assure its future survival” in the face of “the reality of resistance and opposition by numerous sectors of society against further dispossession,” with the state’s ultimate goal being “the institutionalization of paramilitarism and the legalization of capital accumulation through violence.”

War on Narco-terrorists?
Since the official end of the Cold War in 1989, US rhetorical justification for allying itself with and providing military aid to the Colombian government has shifted from fighting “communism” to fighting “narco-terrorism.” Hristov argues that official rhetoric may have changed but it’s still easy to expose this fraudulent war on narco-terrorism as actually being a war against poor people. Concerning the so-called war on terrorism, how can the hemisphere’s worst human rights violator fight terrorism? Then, similar to the absurd notion of a terrorist fighting terrorism, how can a government heavily complicit in the drug trade claim that it is fighting a war on drugs?

The Colombian government’s multi-faceted complicity in drug trafficking extends all the way to current President Uribe, who was listed by the Pentagon itself, as one of the most wanted international drug traffickers. A declassified National Security Archives report dated September 23, 1991, explicitly accused Uribe of being a collaborator of the Medellín cartel and a personal friend of Pablo Escobar. This report states further that Uribe was one of the “more important Colombian narco-terrorists contracted by the Colombian narcotics cartels for security, transportation, distribution, collection, and enforcement of narcotics operations in both the US and Colombia. These individuals are also contracted as ‘HIT MEN’ to assassinate individuals targeted by the ‘extraditables,’ or individual ‘narcotic leaders,’ and to perform terrorist acts against Colombian officials, other government officials, law enforcement agencies, and groups of other political persuasions.”

It’s not just the Colombian government! Hristov argues that the US government’s Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) “has in reality been converted largely to an instrument of drug traffickers and paramilitaries.” To support this assertion, she cites a 2004 memorandum issued by a lawyer at the US Department of Justice named Thomas M. Kent, which accused the DEA of extreme misconduct. Kent states that strong evidence of misconduct is routinely ignored by the control agencies of the Department of Justice. Hristov summarizes key points made in Kent’s memorandum, including “to supplement their $7,000 monthly salary, some DEA agents have managed to negotiate with Colombian drug dealers… DEA personnel have been implicated in the killing of informants… Members of the AUC [paramilitaries] have been assisted by DEA agents in money laundering… DEA agents have participated in the extortion of drug traffickers awaiting extradition.”

On another note, Hristov makes the important point that drug trafficking and the rise of paramilitaries have both fed each other in two key ways. “First, the groups involved in trafficking needed to protect their laboratories, illegal cultivation, and clandestine airstrips in rural areas stimulated the emergence of local armed groups outside the state. Second, many drug dealers had begun to invest their capital in millions of hectares of the best agricultural land in the country…and they needed armed forces to protect their lands.” Hristov adds further that “the preexisting concentration of land ownership in the hands of the elite and the displacement of impoverished peasants was aggravated dramatically by this trend.”

To further expose this fraudulent “war on drugs,” it should be noted that the US government has a long history of complicity in drug trafficking, particularly in Latin America. Alfred McCoy has written the most comprehensive book, titled The Politics of Heroin, documenting the CIA’s relationships with drug traffickers around the world, including in France, Italy, China, Laos, Afghanistan, Haiti, and throughout Latin America. In 1989, a Senatorial Committee chaired by Senator John Kerry documented that during the 1980s, while working with the anti-Sandinista “Contras,” the CIA and other branches of the US government were complicit in trafficking cocaine into the US from Latin America. The Kerry Committee concluded a three-year investigation by stating in their report that “there was substantial evidence of drug smuggling through the war zones on the part of individual Contras, Contra suppliers, Contra pilots, mercenaries who worked with the Contras, and Contra supporters throughout the region… US officials involved in Central America failed to address the drug issue for fear of jeopardizing the war efforts against Nicaragua… In each case, one or another agency of the US government had information regarding the involvement either while it was occurring, or immediately thereafter.”

The Kerry Committee’s report and the story behind it has been analyzed well by authors Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall in their book Cocaine Politics. In 1996, investigative journalist Gary Webb wrote a series of articles for the San Jose Mercury News (later expanded and made into a book in 1999) which directly tied Contra cocaine traffickers Danilo Blandon and Norwin Meneses (both protected by the US government) to Los Angeles drug kingpin “Freeway” Rick Ross, who played a key role in starting the crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s. The mainstream media launched a smear campaign attacking Webb’s story that eventually caused even the Mercury News to denounce Webb. However, several prominent journalists came to Webb’s defense and challenged the mainstream media’s smear campaign, including Norman Solomon, Robert Parry, and Counterpunch co-editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair.

Unmasking The Unholy Alliance

The relationship between the US and Colombian elite is truly an unholy alliance. With US President Barack Obama praising the Colombian government and attempting to build several new military bases in Colombia, it is more important than ever to expose the truth about who supports death squads and why. Hopefully Blood & Capital will receive the attention that it deserves, and Hristov’s meticulous research can be used to truly disarm the state coercive apparatus in Colombia.

—-

Hans Bennett is an independent multi-media journalist whose website is Insubordination

This review first appeared Sept. 3 in Upside Down World.

Resources:

Human Rights Watch 2008 report on Colombia
http://www.hrw.org/en/node/79342

From our Daily Report:

Colombian vice president investigated over paramilitary ties
World War 4 Report, Oct. 21, 2009

See also:

THE PERMANENT PEOPLE’S TRIBUNAL ON COLOMBIA
Verdict Charges Corporations With License to Kill
by Dawn Paley, Upside Down World
World War 4 Report, September 2008

COLOMBIA’S HEART OF DARKNESS IN MANHATTAN —AND D.C.
by Bill Weinberg, The Nation
World War 4 Report, August 2008

FAREWELL, GARY WEBB
The “Dark Alliance” Imbroglio and the Dark End of an Embattled Journalist
by Bill Weinberg, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2005

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Nov. 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingNEOLIBERALISM NEEDS DEATH SQUADS IN COLOMBIA 

PLAN COLOMBIA: EXPORTING THE MODEL

Washington’s Counter-insurgency Laboratory—from Mexico to Afghanistan

by Bill Weinberg, NACLA News

The Merida Initiative, Washington’s new security program for Mexico and Central America, was immediately dubbed “Plan Mexico” by its critics—implying it is a new version of Plan Colombia.

In fact, from its origins ten years ago, the multi-billion dollar aid package and militarized anti-narcotics program dubbed Plan Colombia was seen as a model to be applied elsewhere in the hemisphere. The first steps were down the Andean chain to Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, in an expanded version of the program, the Andean Regional Initiative. But unanticipated gains for popular movements and the left in Bolivia and Ecuador have largely halted Washington’s integrated program of drug war cooperation and military aid in these nations. Peru continued to follow the model—and violence is fast escalating there. Now, with growing fears in Washington of Mexico’s destabilization, a similar program has been developed for the Mesoamerican isthmus.

Simultaneously, Pentagon planners have been explicitly evoking Plan Colombia as a model for the war in Afghanistan—where counter-insurgency and counter-narcotics efforts have likewise become inexorably entwined.

Ironically, Colombia itself has seen rising cocaine production as well as continued horrific violence and rights abuses throughout the years the Plan has been in effect. There is a sense of policy-makers creating what they ostensibly fear.

The Merida Initiative and the specter of intervention
In March 2007, some 20 were arrested and several injured in protests against the visit of President George Bush to the southern Mexican city of Mérida. Meeting with Mexico’s President Felipe Calderón and Central American leaders in the historic Yucatan city, Bush won agreement for a regional security program to be known as the Merida Initiative.

The Bush administration called the Merida Initiative “a new paradigm” of bilateral cooperation in the war on drugs and terrorism, calling for a $1.4 billion, multiyear “security cooperation package.” Some 40% of the funds were slated for new helicopters and surveillance aircraft for the Mexican army, with large chunks for the federal police and the security forces of the Central American republics. Mexican leaders were quick to emphasize that, in contrast to Plan Colombia, the Initiative did not call for stationing US military troops and advisors south of the border.

The Merida Initiative made its way through Congress in 2008. As part of an emergency appropriations bill, the Senate in May approved the first installment: $350 million in drug war aid to Mexico, with an additional $100 million for Central America, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Reducing the Bush administration’s request for $500 million to Mexico and $50 million to Central America, the Senate also adopted language that would hold up a quarter of the funds until the State Department rules that Mexico is meeting human rights markers. The House approved $400 million for Mexico, with similar provisions.

At the 47th US-Mexico Interparliamentary Commission, held June 6 in Monterrey, Mexican politicians from all of the three leading parties protested the imposition of human rights conditions on the aid package as patronizing and hypocritical.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-CT) stuck up for Mexico’s rejection of human rights conditions. “Our friends in Mexico needed to vent and explain how this issue was not handled well,” the senator told a reporter. “Anything that smacks of certification is a nonstarter.” Dodd was likewise a champion of Plan Colombia back in 2000, and critics point out that he was a big donation recipient from United Technologies, the Connecticut-based company that produces the Blackhawk helicopter—several of which were provided to Bogotá under the aid package.

Later in June, the House and Senate worked out a compromise that reduced the human rights conditions to a consultative process between Mexico and the US. The “conditions” were downgraded to “guidelines.” This concretely meant that the amount of the aid which can be withheld was reduced from 25% to 15%.

Under pressure from US human rights and labor activists—who openly called the initiative “Plan Mexico”—Congress officially expressed concern about specific claims of rights abuses, such as the harsh repression of 2006 protests in Oaxaca.

In a propaganda piece plugging the Merida Initiative, Ray Walser of the right-wing Heritage Foundation was quick to dismiss the analogy with Plan Colombia: “Unlike Plan Colombia, which helped to rescue Colombia from the throes of a narco-war, the Merida Initiative will provide assistance in equipment, technology, and training without a significant US military footprint in Mexico.”

The RAND Corporation took a more distanced view, writing in an analysis after the passage of the Merida Initiative:

In Colombia, strategic cooperation and large amounts of U.S. aid failed to stem the production of narcotics. Nearly two-thirds of global cocaine continues to be produced in Colombia. Yet it is undeniable that Plan Colombia, an eight-year strategic initiative providing $6 billion in U.S. aid, succeeded in depriving the FARC rebels of drug profits by strengthening the Colombian military and police to target violent traffickers. While trafficking itself remains a problem, Colombia is no longer in danger of becoming either a “failed state” or an anemic, low-growth quasi-democracy—an outcome that is yet possible for Mexico.

There was no doubt of the urgency of Mexico’s crisis. The near-daily assassinations, along with the cartels’ growing habit of decapitating their victims and issuing threats using posters and the Internet, “have a clear objective to intimidate, frighten, paralyze society and, with that, force the federal government to retreat,” said Government Secretary Juan Camilo Mourino. He hailed the approval of the aid package as “a concrete expression of the principle of shared responsibility” in the drug war.

The US released the first $197 million of the $400 million package in December. At a signing ceremony in Mexico City, US Ambassador Tony Garza called the package “the most significant effort ever undertaken” by the US and Mexico to fight drugs. Carlos Rico, Mexico’s undersecretary for North American affairs, expressed his confidence that the Barack Obama administration will remain committed to the program, and that any human rights concerns can be resolved.

But US leaders were soon discussing the Initiative in terms certain to alarm Mexican nationalists. President Barack Obama was briefed March 7 by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Adm. Mike Mullen about Mexico’s drug wars. “They have an urgent need,” Mullen told reporters as he returned from his first official visit to Mexico, adding that tactics used against militant networks in Iraq and Afghanistan need to be employed in Mexico: “They need intelligence support, capabilities and tactics that have evolved for us in our fight against networks in the terrorist world. There are an awful lot of similarities.”

During his meetings with Mexico’s military leadership, Mullen said he discussed how Washington could help in the battle against the cartels, especially citing “ISR,” for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance—a term that often refers to the use of unmanned drones.

Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA), the top Republican on the House Appropriations Committee, speaking in back-to-back hearings of his committee and the Homeland Security Subcommittee March 10, said the Defense Department must make Mexico as big a priority as Afghanistan. Lewis asserted, “one of our problems is that the Department of Defense somehow puts Afghanistan ahead of the challenges on the Mexican border.”

Officials from Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection bureau defended the success of border security measures. Officials said the escalating cartel violence in Mexico is evidence that the US border security plan is working. “They are fighting for territory,” Border Patrol Chief David Aguilar said of the drug cartels.

Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) thanked Aguilar for his service: “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what all of you do. You truly are in our prayers on a daily basis. You’re on the front lines of an undeclared war unlike any we’ve ever seen on the southern border probably since 1916.”

Elaborating on the 1916 reference, Culberson said: “I think we are at the point today that we need to send the Black Jack Pershing into the Southern United States and put it in command of a true, fast-reaction military force that can move up and down that border on the US side.” Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing led an expedition into Mexico with 10,000 troops to hunt down Pancho Villa after the famous revolutionary had carried out a raid across the US border.

Meanwhile, some 7,000 Mexican soldiers and federal police arrived in Ciudad Juárez in a bid to restore order amid an escalating bloody turf war between rival drug cartels. In what some called Mexico’s internal “surge,” masked soldiers patrolled the streets in long convoys of military vehicles, throwing up checkpoints.

Weeks later, a delegation of political leaders from Juárez and the state of Chihuahua visited Colombia, where they won commitments from the Colombian government to send National Police officers to train the Chihuahua police.

As in Colombia, where the military’s collaboration with the ostensibly outlawed paramilitaries remains a source of controversy, there appears to be a degree of inter-penetration between Mexico’s security forces and drug cartels. The notorious May 16, 2009 jailbreak at a state prison in Zacatecas was but the latest in a string of incidents in which apparent cartel paramilitary forces wore the uniforms of elite federal police agencies. Footage from security cameras show that a convoy of 17 vehicles, backed by a helicopter, approached Cieneguillas state prison, meeting no resistance from guards. About 30 men—some in the uniforms of the Federal Agency of Investigation (AFI) and Federal Preventive Police (PFP)—entered the facility, rounded up 53 prisoners, loaded them into the cars and sped away. Most of the escapees were said to be affiliated with the Zetas.

A 2008 year-end report by the Pentagon’s Joint Forces Command named two countries as likely candidates for a “rapid and sudden collapse”: Pakistan and Mexico. The report, code-named JOE 2008 (for Joint Operating Environment), stated: “In terms of worse-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico. The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and press by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state.”

In a RAND study released nearly simultaneously with the Pentagon report, “Could Mexico Fail?,” analyst Brian Michael Jenkins explicitly invoked the memory of the Revolution. Read the abstract:

The Mexican Revolution, from 1910 to 1920, engulfed the entire border region, and political turmoil in Mexico precipitated a crime wave in the United States. Thus, current concerns about the growing lawlessness in northern Mexico and its consequences for U.S. national security are not without precedent.

As President-elect Barack Obama and President George Bush met Jan. 12 in Washington with Mexican President Felipe Calderón, Gen. (ret.) Barry McCaffrey—who as President Bill Clinton’s drug czar was a key architect of Plan Colombia—held a press conference to issue dire warnings: “Mexico is on the edge of the abyss—it could become a narco-state in the coming decade… However, President Calderón and Mexico’s senior leadership have launched a serious attempt to reclaim the rule of law from the chaos of the drug cartels.” McCaffrey called for increased US military aid to Mexico, calling the Merida Initiative “a drop in the bucket compared to what was spent in Iraq and Afghanistan ($700 billion to date). We cannot afford to have a narco-state as a neighbor.”

Mexican officials were quick to deny the ominous claims. Mexican President Felipe Calderón labeled talk of his country’s collapse as “false, absurd,” and challenged the US to clean up its own act by curbing drug use and arms trafficking.

The US Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Dennis Blair, speaking to reporters in Washington March 26, also downplayed the notion that narco-violence has brought Mexico to the brink of collapse: “Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. Repeat that. Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. The violence we see now is the result of Mexico taking action against the drug cartels… The Mexican campaign is our campaign.”

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also clearly had mending fences in mind on her trip to Mexico that week. In Mexico City, at a joint news conference with Foreign Minister Espinosa, Clinton said: “We know very well that the drug traffickers are motivated by the demand for illegal drugs in the United States, that they are armed by the transport of weapons from the United States to Mexico. We see this as a responsibility to assist the Mexican government and people.” Clinton also joined Public Security Secretary Genaro García Luna for a visit to the Federal District’s new Iztapalapa headquarters for Mexico’s Federal Preventative Police, where she was briefed on missions undertaken by US-supplied Blackhawk helicopters.

The Obama administration has requested $66 million in additional 2009 assistance to Mexico through the State Department’s International Narcotics Control and Law Enforcement program (INCLE). The bill passed by the House of Representatives in May actually goes well beyond this request. It would provide Mexico with $470 million: $160 million in INCLE funding and $310 million in military and police aid through Foreign Military Financing (FMF). If the House version of the bill is approved, Mexico would surpass Colombia as the Western Hemisphere’s top recipient of US military and police aid.

The Andean Regional Initiative: Bolivia, Ecuador break ranks
There is a sense of deja vu here. Upon taking office in 2001, President George Bush inherited the $1.6 billion five-year Plan Colombia aid package, which had been passed the previous year. But he immediately expanded the program to include coordinated aid packages for Peru, Ecuador and Bolivia. Dubbed the Andean Regional Initiative, this program incorporated Plan Colombia.

Speaking to a House subcommittee in 2004, Robert B. Charles, assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs, called the Andean Regional Initiative “a bulwark against the threat of terrorism in Colombia, Bolivia, Peru… In short, it is a regional hemispheric and national security program, with direct implications, for homeland security and for our well being here in the continental United States… In Colombia, and elsewhere in the hemisphere, the link between drug money and terrorism is incontrovertible.”

But before the Colombian model could be replicated throughout the Andes, Washington’s design succumbed to the wave of change sweeping the South American continent—especially the 2005 election of an Aymara coca grower as South America’s first indigenous president: Evo Morales of the Movement to Socialism (MAS).

In 2008, Morales expelled the DEA from Bolivian territory, charging that the agency was actually involved in the drug traffic, and “did not respect the police, or even the [Bolivian] armed forces.” In January 2009, Bolivian voters approved a new constitution that explicitly recognizes coca leaf as a cultural heritage of the country’s indigenous peoples.

Morales, in Washington for an OAS meeting last November, drew parallels between himself and US President-elect Barack Obama, and said he looked forward to improved relations—but added: “The DEA will not return while I am still president.”

The 2006 election of the populist Rafael Correa similarly drew a halt to that country’s integration into the ARI. Correa quickly made it clear that he would not renew the US Southern Command’s 10-year usage rights for Manta air base when they expire in 2009. In September 2008, Ecuadoran voters approved a new constitution expressly forbidding foreign military bases.

Bolivia and Ecuador are slated to receive $30 million and $7 million, respectively, under the State Department’s Andean Counterdrug Initiative in FY 2009—but with a greater emphasis on non-military aspects of the program than in previous years.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) in its 2008 annual report found a “shock” rise in coca production in Colombia of 27% in the previous year. By contrast, coca cultivation was up 5% in Bolivia and 4% in Peru. In contrast to the situation 20 years ago, when Bolivia led world production, Bolivia was now the third producer after Colombia and Peru. This was, to say the least, counterintuitive news for Plan Colombia’s supporters.

In the UNODC’s annual report for 2009, the agency did register an 18% decline in Colombian coca cultivation—partially offset by continued rises in Bolivia and Peru. But this still represents a significant net gain since Plan Colombia took effect.

Meanwhile, the human rights situation in Colombia remains grave. Amnesty International’s 2008 annual report on Colombia found: “All parties to the 40-year-old conflict committed violations of international humanitarian law, including war crimes and crimes against humanity… Fewer people were killed by paramilitary groups than in previous years. However, reports of killings of civilians by the security forces rose… The number of people forced to flee their homes by the conflict also rose.”

Peru follows militarized model
The turn-around that brought the post-populist Alan García back to power in Peru after 16 years out of office in 2006 has done nothing to slow Peru’s advancement on the militarized ARI model. With Peru and Colombia now the only full-fledged members left, the ARI name was dropped after 2004, although aid to Peru continued to be administrated through the Andean Counterdrug Initiative.

Indeed, in Peru’s Andean interior, a new counterinsurgency campaign has emerged in the past year, redolent of the dark days of the ’80s and early ’90s, when the nation was convulsed by a brutal struggle with the Shining Path guerillas.

In March 2009, local human rights groups reported that more than 300 families were displaced from their lands by the armed forces’ “Plan Excelencia 777,” launched earlier that month to take control of Vizcatán zone, considered a stronghold of narco-trafficking and “terrorist” organizations—meaning resurgent Shining Path remnants—in the Valley of the Apurímac and Ene Rivers (VRAE). The reports were denied by the armed forces. But Nolberto Lamilla of the Asociación Paz y Esperanza in Ayacucho, the regional capital, told the local media that arbitrary detainments and even “disappearances” by the military had residents in a state of fear.

Guerillas killed at least 26 people in Peru in 2008, including 22 soldiers and police officers—the bloodiest year since the late 1990s. In 2007, the latest year for which data is available, coca cultivation in Peru increased by 4%, the highest level in a decade. Estimated cocaine production rose to a 10-year high of some 290 tons.

In October 2008, forensic examinations determined that five bodies found in Ayacucho’s remote Río Seco village were relations of a peasant woman who reported the disappearance of 11 family members after the National Police had conducted a “counter-subversive” operation in the area. The bodies are reportedly those of the woman’s husband, brothers and a sister-in-law, who had been pregnant. Two children and four adults remained missing. Ironically, some of the disappeared were apparently members of the rondas, a peasant self-defense militia established to defend local communities against Shining Path attack at the height of the insurgency.

Peruvian opposition Congress members called for a special commission to investigate the disappearances, and the national human rights ombudsman sent a team of investigators to Río Seco. The disappearances took place while US troops were in Ayacucho on an ostensible “humanitarian” mission, building clinics and schools. This occasioned much speculation in Peru’s press that Washington is seeking military bases in the country—which was denied by the US embassy.

Ominously, the violence is re-emerging just as forensic investigations are underway in Ayacucho region, investigating atrocities carried out by the security forces in the bloody struggle with the Shining Path in the ’80s and early ’90s. An exhumation in the village of Huanta in March 2009 revealed the remains of 49 people from a mass grave—victims of a massacre by the Peruvian armed forces in 1984.

The US currently provides Peru with some $100 million in aid annually. The DEA maintains vigorous operations in the country.

There is the potential that Peru will follow Bolivia and Ecuador out of the US orbit. At a People’s Summit in Lima last May, Peru’s indigenous organizations launched a new alliance to defend their collective rights—and win power in the 2011 presidential elections. The National Association of Peruvian Coca Producers (CONPACCP) has already launched a political party, Kuska (“united” in the Quechua language), with a support base in the VRAE, where it has won mayoral elections in seven municipalities.

The Merida Initiative thus closes a grim circle. In the years since NAFTA was passed, the narco economy and attendant violence have exploded horrifically in Mexico, with the drug trade filling the economic vacuum created by the dropping of traditional public supports for the country’s campesino sector. Just as Mexico is adopting a militarized “anti-drug” program based on Plan Colombia, Colombia is moving towards a free trade agreement with Washington based on NAFTA. Peru signed a similar agreement last year. It remains to be seen if the Obama administration will wake up to the vicious cycle seemingly at work here.

Plan Colombia as model for Afghanistan
In recent years, Pentagon planners have come to see Colombia as a model for their war across the planet in Afghanistan. Despite obvious differences—an arid rather than lush terrain, and the ultra-conservative Taliban insurgency rather than ostensibly leftist FARC guerilla movement—there is a clear parallel between the two countries. In both, illicit crops—opium in Afghanistan—provide both a source of funds for the insurgency and a means of winning peasant loyalties: protecting growers from government eradication efforts. In both, the US has nonetheless aggressively pushed for eradication.

In 2007, the US brought in a corps of Colombian National Police to train the Afghan police force’s National Interdiction Unit (NIU) in counter-narcotics tactics. The exchange was worked out after Afghanistan’s counter-narcotics minister Habibullah Qaderi visited Bogotá in 2005—with US encouragement. A spokesperson for the US embassy in Bogotá told the BBC that the “educational exchanges had fostered greater co-operation and understanding in countering global drug-trafficking.”

Just as the training program got underway, the Washington appointed its ambassador in Bogotá, William Wood, as its new envoy to Afghanistan.

Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, in his comment on the exchange, said Afghanistan could learn from Colombian social projects aimed at breaking the hold of the rural narco economy, and demobilization of illegal paramilitaries. “I think those kinds of outreach programs by the Colombian government are good models for President Karzai to consider as he looks at how to reduce the amount of drug trafficking in his country and promote instability,” he told reporters in Bogotá.

But the US applied more pressure for Afghanistan to adopt a more controversial aspect of Plan Colombia—the aerial spraying of herbicide to eradicate drug crops. Even as the Colombian training program in Afghanistan was getting underway, President Hamid Karzai rebuffed Washington’s proposal for a program to spray poppy fields. Karzai voiced his concern for the health impacts, and the destruction of legal crops.

Karzai’s Counter-narcotics Ministry issued a statement that “traditional techniques” would be used for eradication—that is, sending teams of laborers backed up by NIU agents to trample and plough under the crop. However, an unnamed US official told Reuters he believed Karzai would agree to spraying if manual eradication failed to cut production.

In 2004, US-contracted aircraft apparently did a test run for the fumigation program, secretly spraying a placebo of plastic granules over poppy fields in Afghanistan to gauge public reaction. The test spray sparked harsh protests from poor farmers, tribal chiefs and government officials up to President Karzai, who demanded to know details of the incident. US officials up to the level of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad denied any knowledge.

Speaking to McClatchy news service, US officials declined to identify the agency that oversaw the test spraying, but noted that the State Department oversees counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan (as well as the spray program in Colombia). The department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement declined to comment.

Today, there are signals that the Obama administration is reconsidering an aggressive eradication strategy for Afghanistan. Special envoy Richard Holbrooke, speaking at the opening of the G8 meeting in Italy in June, said the eradication policy has been “a failure” and that crop-substitution programs should be pursued instead.

“Spraying the crops just penalizes the farmer, and they grow crops somewhere else,” Holbrooke said. “The hundreds of millions of dollars we spend on crop eradication has not had any damage on the Taliban. On the contrary, it has helped them recruit.”

But aggressive eradication and (largely ineffectual) crop-substitution programs have co-existed in Colombia for years; peasants in inaccessible regions have no means of getting legal crops to market, while drug lords helpfully pick up illicit harvests themselves. The White House Drug Czar’s office admits: “The remote location and rugged terrain of poppy growing areas are major obstacles to establishing crop-substitution programs.”

The Colombian government’s recent gains against the FARC—coupled with the current US reversals in Afghanistan—have led Pentagon leaders to return to the theme of replicating Plan Colombia in the Hindu Kush. “I think many of us from all over the world can learn from what has happened with respect to the very successful developments of Plan Colombia,” Adm. Mullen said this March. “As in all plans, there are parts of it that would be very applicable in other parts of the world and specifically to Afghanistan…”

Unfortunately, “success” against the FARC in Colombia has not been reflected in an improvement in the country’s human rights climate. Amnesty International in its most recent annual report on the country noted: “Fewer people were killed by paramilitary groups than in previous years. However, reports of killings of civilians by the security forces rose… The number of people forced to flee their homes by the conflict also rose.”

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This article first appeared July 9 on NACLA News.

From our Daily Report:

US signs military base plan with Colombia
World War 4 Report, Oct. 31, 2009

US military bases for Peru?
World War 4 Report, Sept. 4, 2009

Leahy blocks State Department rights report on Mexico
World War 4 Report, Aug. 9, 2009

Colombia to train Baja California state police
World War 4 Report, July 6, 2009

US shifts Afghan opium strategy
World War 4 Report, July 28, 2009

See also:

THE “COLOMBIANIZATION” OF CHIHUAHUA
by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, June 2009

COLOMBIA & IRAQ: HALLIBURTON MAKES THE CONNECTION
by Daniel Leal Diaz, World War 4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2005

See related story, this issue:

DRUGS AND DEINDUSTRIALIZATION
The Free-Trade Roots of Mexico’s Narco Crisis—And Philadelphia’s
by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, November 2009

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, November 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingPLAN COLOMBIA: EXPORTING THE MODEL 

DEINDUSTRIALIZATION, DRUGS AND RECOVERY

by Kent Paterson, Frontera NorteSur

The following story, filed October 4 by the independent news service Frontera NorteSur, is a report on the US War on Drugs conference held in El Paso, Texas, on September 21 and 22 of this year. The event was initiated by faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) and supported by a host of local organizations and agencies.

The struggling corn fields of northern Chihuahua and the shuttered textile plants of North Philadelphia might seem worlds apart. Although nationhood, language and culture separate the two places, a history of globalization, deindustrialization and drug culture shape both entities.

As part of the landmark US War on Drugs Conference held in El Paso late last month, speakers examined the complex political economy that underlies the production, distribution and use of illegal drugs.

In a presentation at the University of Texas at El Paso, Chihuahua state lawmaker Victor Quintana delved into the socio-economic backdrop to the extreme violence raging away in northwestern Chihuahua, where rival cartels have turned entire zones into battlefields. Quintana took the audience back to 1982, when Mexico‚s ruling PRI party began instituting what later became known as a neo-liberal, or free market, economic policy.

In line with the project popularized by Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, as well as the International Monetary Fund, state subsidies and supports for farmers were steadily eliminated, pressuring small growers off the land and into the migrant stream stirred up by the North American Free Trade Agreement and (NAFTA) and Mexico’s 1994-95 economic crisis.

An economic vacuum in the countryside was then filled by an illegal and profitable drug economy, which was marked by three stages, Quintana said. First, migrants returning from the US helped implant a drug culture that was initially controlled by locals who were well-known in their own communities and shared the proceeds of their illicit trade.

Later, outsiders with an eye on northwestern Chihuahua’s fertile lands and strategic highways leading to the US border moved in and replaced the “community narcos.” The result was the bloody orgy of violence that now destabilizes Chihuahua, Quintana said, adding that drug gangs have consolidated so much control that local police warn only air operations can penetrate certain zones.

The Philadelphia Story
Though the particulars were different, urban historian Dr. Eric Schneider separately told a similar story about North Philadelphia, a place he described as “the badlands” of the City of Brotherly Love. For Schneider, the closing of Philadelphia‚s Stetson Hat Company, which once produced the emblematic hat of the American West, was a watershed for a community with a once-thriving industrial base.

A University of Pennsylvania professor interested in globalization, Schneider recounted how he asked his students to examine the labels where their clothing was made, and then took the pupils on a tour of largely African-American North Philadelphia.

As in Chihuahua, an illegal business filled an economic void in de-industrialized Philadelphia, according to Schneider. High unemployment, marginalization of communities of color, a landscape of abandoned homes and plants and easy highway access all create a “perfect place” for a drug market, he said.

In the post-industrial US, North Philadelphia represents the prototype of an urban drug market. Such urban markets, or “drug enterprise zones,” in the words of Schneider, acquire a life of their own, providing employment not only for marginalized youths but for police, other agencies of the criminal justice system and even rehabilitation centers charged with suppressing or controlling illegal activities. Urban drug markets are conducive to graft, Schneider insisted, citing the case of the infamous “Gold Coast” of Harlem during the 1970s which inspired corruption within the ranks of the New York Police Department.

With the official US unemployment rate nudging 10%, and with some economists predicting a long, jobless “recovery” from the 2008 economic crash, the type of urban drug markets chronicled by Schneider could have new, urgent meaning.

Schneider later told Frontera NorteSur that he hadn’t studied the specific links between drug trafficking and free trade agreements like NAFTA, but he observed how both legal and illegal commodities often follow the same trade routes. “The pathways are the same and frequently the entrepreneurs are the same-at least on the underground side,” Schneider said.

Institutionalizing the Drug Culture
Dr. Michael Agar, researcher for the Santa Fe-based Ethknoworks, detailed how the popularity of imported drugs like opium and heroin have waxed and waned over the decades, infiltrating different social classes and groups—from middle-class white women at the turn of the 20th century to working class immigrants in the 1940s and to suburban white youth at the end of the last century.

Despite decades of the drug war, the US market remains brisk. Even though some reductions in cocaine and methamphetamine use have been reported in recent years, large numbers of people still consume old drugs of fashion as well as newer ones like Ecstasy.

Also appearing at the El Paso conference, Dr. H. Westley Clark, director of the US Health and Human Services‚ Center for Substance Abuse Treatment, the Center told a session at the historic Fox Theater in downtown El Paso that the 2008 National Drug Survey reported that there were at least 23 million US residents who needed treatment for alcohol and illicit drugs abuse. The huge population grouping, more or less the equivalent of the number of people residing in greater Mexico City, represents about 7% of the US population, Clark said. In the United States, eight million children lived with a drug dependent parent last year, he stressed.

Carolyn Esparza, director of Community Solutions of El Paso, a border non-profit that helps children of imprisoned adults, expanded on Clark’s points. A six-year-old organization, Esparza‚s organization has assisted 7,000 children of prisoners in El Paso. “We are just the tip of the iceberg,” Esparza said. The child advocate blamed much of the problem of families divided by the correctional system on lawbreakers who commit crimes due to drug and drinking habits but don’t receive treatment while incarcerated. One in seven school children in the US have a parent on probation, on parole or in jail, she said.

Mexico, meanwhile, is headed down the same path. Quoting sources from the federal attorney general’s office who participated in a national meeting at the beginning of October, Mexico‚s La Jornada newspaper reported that drug consumption among youths has risen 127 percent since December 2006, with addictions beginning at 10 years of age instead of 12 years of age as was previously the case.

In Mexico, the number of people addicted to illegal drugs is variously estimated between 600,000-900,000 individuals, though the country’s 2008 National Drug Addiction Survey reported that an estimated 4.5 million Mexicans used some kind of illegal drug that year.

A Cross-Border Laboratory for Substance Abuse
Straddling a common border, the binational metroplex of El Paso-Ciudad Juárez was an early laboratory where the multiple ingredients of war, trade, violence, drugs and vice were mixed together in a potent combination. An invited speaker at the El Paso conference, Dr. Oscar Martinez of the University of Arizona has written a classic book on the history of Ciudad Juárez.

“The destiny of Ciudad Juárez is tied to the destiny of the US,” Martinez said. “And it’s been that way for a long time.”

While much of the US media acts as if it has just discovered Mexico and its long-simmering social problems, Martinez‚s research documents how contraband smuggling, vice, drugs, corruption and arms trafficking emerged as significant issues in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez and other border cities more than a century ago.

A careful reading of Martinez shows how much of the underworld activity moved from north to south, especially but not exclusively during the Prohibition Era, in contrast to the contemporary media stories of violence and mayhem threatening to spill across the US border from Mexico.

For example, the ABW company founded by North Americans was at the center of the liquor and gaming industries in Baja California, financing the Tijuana race track on property owned by US rail and sugar businessman John D. Spreckel in the early part of the 20th century. In a prelude to the runaway textile and electronics plants of latter years, two Kentucky distilleries as well as sectors of US bar business simply relocated to Ciudad Juárez during Prohibition.

Conversely, El Paso and other US border cities have benefited from turmoil south of the border then and now. For more than 100 years, the US city has served as the recipient of migrant waves and capital infusions during economic and political upheavals across the Rio Grande, Martinez’s research reveals. Today, a new group of middle-class migrants is fleeing the carnage of Ciudad Juarez and putting its resources to work in El Paso.

“El Paso is benefiting tremendously from all this,” Martinez maintained, “and it reminds me of what happened during the Mexican Revolution.”

Antidotes to Crisis
The presenters of the El Paso conference expressed different opinions on how best to address the drug issue: many tended to agree that it is a complicated, multi-faceted phenomenon which eludes simple, one-size-fits all answers, whether it is blanket prohibition or outright legalization.

“I think people are beginning to see that we need to come up with some kind of complex balance and approach that takes all these things into consideration,” said Dr. Joe Heyman, UTEP professor of anthropology and conference co-organizer.

A fair bit of talk focused on community outreach and treatment programs. Federal official Clark insisted that the Obama administration is pursuing a different strategy than the “war on drugs” approach of the last 40 years, favoring instead a combination of strong public safety and strong treatment.

Ethnographer Agar spoke about grassroots-oriented, semi-spontaneous recovery movements in which communities discover the harm drugs do and begin breaking away from addiction cycles on their with little government-encouragement. An example of this has been witnessed with heroin in certain US communities, Agar said.

“We need to learn a lot more about when that happens and how to stimulate that, how to stimulate positive feedback processes in communities,” Agar added.

Both Quintana and Schneider contended that the state and society have to re-examine and change the economic roots of the drug crisis. Quintana advocated a new development policy for the Mexican countryside, which includes removing highly vulnerable basic grain crops from NAFTA, while Schneider proposed a new US urban economic policy as an alternative to the drug economy.

Without bigger changes, Schneider insisted, drug reform policies are practically “irrelevant.” Conceding that it’s difficult to reopen long-closed plants, Schneider nonetheless said, “We need to think about an economy of the 21st century that will employ people.”

UTEP Professor Heyman said that he hoped the intellectual sparks flying at the conference would ignite broader interest in the drug reform issue. For borderlands historian Oscar Martinez, El Paso represented an opportunity to consider the formation of a new organization that could take th conference on the road to other cities.

Addressing a crowd, Martinez called on people to show more empathy for the residents of Ciudad Juárez, reiterating that the city’s inhabitants are bound together with our own lives in myriad ways. Martinez received hardy applause when he urged people to take a stand. “We need to reach into our hearts and say: I too am from Juárez.”

—-

This article first appeared Oct. 4 on Frontera NorteSur.

Resources:

War on Drugs Conference, UTEP
http://warondrugsconference.utep.edu/

Ethknoworks
http://www.ethknoworks.com/

Community Solutions of El Paso
http://www.solutionsforelpaso.org/

From our Daily Report:

Mexico: massacre in Juárez, assassination in Michoacán
World War 4 Report, Sept. 3, 2009

See also:

“OPERATION CHIHUAHUA PLUS”
A Textbook Case in Drug War Failure
from Frontera NorteSur
World War 4 Report, July 2009

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, November 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingDEINDUSTRIALIZATION, DRUGS AND RECOVERY 

VENEZUELA: DEMARCATION WITHOUT LAND

Criminalization and Death for Indigenous Struggle

by José Quintero Weir, El Libertario, Caracas

The editorial collective of the Caracas anarchist journal El Libertario denounces the criminal attack that took place on Oct. 13, 2009 against the Yukpa people in the Sierra de Perijá in western Venezuela, resulting in two indigenous persons dead and several wounded. The following article—about the tactics and strategy of “Revolutionary Venezuelan” ethnocide—describes the events.

Struggle:
Old man Antonio used to say that the struggle is like a circle.
One can start anywhere
But it never ends.
—Subcomandante Marcos

This past October 12, what we have been denouncing for a long time as the ethnocide and ethno-devouring strategy of the current state-government of Venezuela reached a culmination: Chávez’s ministerial team came to award so-called title deeds to three indigenous Yukpa communities in the Sierra of Perijá, with the pretense to finish the process of land demarcation in the habitat belonging to these people. The absence of President Chávez was noteworthy in an event long awaited in the Sierra since the year 2002, when, by constitutional mandate, the State was supposed to finalize the process of land demarcation in all the indigenous territories in the country. Instead, an enormous deployment of soldiers blanketed the event, supposedly for the security of the ministers (Interior and Justice, Indigenous Peoples, among other functionaries present). Yet these soldiers, at the slightest sign of protest by those communities not favored by the event, went immediately into action to repress their demands. It was, in the end, an event by which the Yukpa had to forcefully accept the receipt of nothing.

It was known for weeks before that something was going to happen on the Yukpa side of the Sierra of Perijá. The Regional Demarcation Commission announced the date for awarding the title deeds, but said that it was for three communities: Aroy, Sirapta and Tinacoa, places where the government had already made a deal with the land owners who were in fact spared from giving land to the Yukpa—who received nothing but mountain and rocks, not arable lands, which were legally left in the hands of the land owners.

During this period, in coordinated actions, ministerial commissions headed by Diosdado Cabello (Chávez’s plenipotentiary Minister) and Tarek El Aissami (Interior and Justice) among others, got busy distributing bags of food, promising infrastructure works: schools, roads, hospitals and agricultural projects for those who would accept the give-away of October 12, and threatening those who would oppose it. At the same time, a military base was built in undemarcated Yukpa territory, which was loudly protested by the indigenous people who were repressed by the very same Diosdado Cabello, commissioned by Chávez for the task—since the base is linked to plans that we will discuss later in this article.

Meanwhile, the Chaktapa community and its leader Sabino Romero have become the pebble in the “transnational-Chavista” shoe, as it is the community that didn’t want to wait for the government’s demarcation that condescendingly recognizes the living spaces of these peoples, but instead…decided to reclaim their ancestral territories, occupying and controlling as communal land some six haciendas. For Chávez’s state-government and for the mining transnationals and land owners, this act has turned Sabino and his Chaktapa community into an enemy to defeat. For his daring, has been condemned to death—not as an indigenous warrior who is not for sale, but as a vulgar cattle rustler, a delinquent ready to kidnap and kill, someone linked to foreign military forces and an enemy of the state-government.

Thus, the act of giving land to the Yukpas on October 12 sealed the process by which Chávez’s state-government swallowed up part of the Yukpa communities headed by Efrain Romero of Sirapta and the cacique Olegario Romero—giving them a free hand to act against their own Yukpa brothers of Chaktapa headed by Sabino Romero. The excuse: a charge of cattle theft (120 head) by an ad hoc rancher in which Sabino Romero, the true leader in the struggle for Yukpa territory in the Sierra of Perijá, is directly accused.

Today, October 13, as I write these lines, Sabino is being rescued from Chaktapa with three gunshot wounds inflicted by Olegario’s people who, with the support of ranchers and the “revolutionary” government, attacked him, killing one of his sons-in-law, wounding two of his sons and a grand-daughter, while another of his sons has disappeared. All of this is the result of a grand strategy by the “Bolivarian revolution” regarding the demarcation of lands and indigenous habitats in the Sierra of Perijá.

Therefore, we responsibly denounce that President Hugo Chávez knew what was going to happen. That is why he didn’t attend the shameful act of October 12. We make this denunciation as we already begin to see the news on the state-owned channel trying to confuse the facts. Likewise, we read and listen to confusing reports by traditional opposition journalists and land-owners from Fegalago justifying the actions against Sabino and the Chaktapa community, paradoxically joining the state-government in this policy… Therefore we denounce that everything that happened or may happen is just the tactical execution of a political strategy of ethnocide and ethno-devouring, the policy by a government that continues to cling to the language of the poor to maintain what is truly essential: its power.

Within this strategy of permanence in power, Chávez has opted for the continuation of development projects combined with the exploitation of non-traditional minerals such as uranium—which is known to exist in the Yukpa region of the Perijá. Therefore, the state-government builds a military base contested by the Yukpa but defended, in the president’s name, by Diosdado Cabello as part of a Chávez-Iran project to exploit the uranium. At the same time, it gives a free hand to other mining projects and assures for the land-owners the territorial despoliation of the indigenous people.

We’ve had enough with honest comrades in solidarity with the indigenous struggle who continue to justify Chávez and place the guilt for the foolish policies against people on his bureaucracy. The guilty ones are the guilty ones, and in this case they are Chávez, Diosdado Cabello and Tarek El Aissami. These three will someday have to account for whatever happens to Sabino Romero and his community that, against all odds, continues in the struggle because they have decided that is their path and the path of all indigenous communities in the country.

—-

This article first appeared Oct. 13 in El Libertario. Our translation is adapted from one provided by El Libertario’s Luis J. Prat.

From our Daily Report:

Hugo Chávez: Iran aids Venezuela uranium exploration
World War 4 Report, Oct. 18, 2009

Survival International: Colombian guerillas threaten Yukpa indigenous people
World War 4 Report, Feb. 6, 2008

Venezuela to militarize Colombian border
World War 4 Report, Nov. 10, 2008

Venezuela: indigenous people salute Zapatistas
World War 4 Report, July 26, 2007

See also:

TERROR IN PERIJÁ
Resource Wars on Venezuela’s Indigenous Frontier
from El Mundo/Libertario, Caracas
World War 4 Report, March 2009

See related story, this issue:

VENEZUELAN LABOR BETWEEN CHAVEZ AND THE GOLPISTAS
The Bolivarian Government Against Union Autonomy
by Rafael Uzcategui, Tierra y Libertad
World War 4 Report, November 2009

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, November 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingVENEZUELA: DEMARCATION WITHOUT LAND 

VENEZUELAN LABOR BETWEEN CHAVEZ AND THE GOLPISTAS

The Bolivarian Government Against Union Autonomy

by Rafael Uzcategui, Tierra y Libertad

Orlando Chirino, a revolutionary Venezuelan labor leader, has recently denounced the Bolivarian government as “anti-worker and anti-union.” It would be difficult to accuse Chirino of being a “golpista” or an “ally of imperialism.” In the year 2002, he condemned the coup, mobilizing to defend the state oil industry from the work stoppage driven by management leadership. In each occasion presented him, he supported and accompanied workers’ attempts to control factories closed by their bosses. He is rooted among the workers and was made a leader in the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), the labor union promoted by his own president Hugo Chávez.

If Orlando has been part of the so-called Bolivarian movement for many years, what has happened in 2009 to get him to make these kinds of statements about the government he once defended? The main part of the answer is: because Chirino is an iron defender of the unions’ autonomy.

The attempt to control the workers’ movement from above began as soon as Hugo Chávez was elected president of Venezuela. In 1999 a clash began with the traditional Confederación de Trabajadores de Venezuela (CTV), a labor union created in 1947 by the influence of Acción Democrática [a center-left political party—AD], and changed, since 1959, into the main negotiator of the labor policies developed by the state. Nevertheless, in spite of Chavistas’ questions about the irregularities and vices of this organization, in the absence of their own labor movement, they participated in its internal elections in October 2001. The Bolivarian candidate, Aristóbulo Isturiz, was defeated by the AD candidate Carlos Ortega, who became the president of the CTV. A year and a half later, repeating the same history of the CTV, the government created by decree what it called “the real labor union”: the Unión Nacional de Trabajadores (UNT), which quickly reproduced the corruption that it claimed to fight.

One Marxist organization that participated in its foundation, Opción Obrera, says it more clearly than us: “The UNT was born under agreements from above, and was ridden for a show for the rank and file; few authentic union leaders had power in it…” The UNT was born with governmental protection, which lifted it up. The criticized ‘perks’ of the old CTV unionism are now granted to the leaders of the UNT, who are staunch supporters of the government.” Paradoxically, faced with the limited acceptance of the new labor union among the mass of workers, and the resistance of some sectors of the union to their cooptation, the Bolivarian power promoted new organizations in order to displace the UNT, as is the case of the Frente Socialista Bolivariano de los Trabajadores (FSBT).

A second milestone, justified with the argument of weakening the CTV bureaucracy, was the promotion of the so-called “union parallelism” [paralelismo sindical] from the seat of government, creating unions artificially, from outside, in the principal industries of the country. In this way Chavismo would be able to boast that with almost 700 registered unions, the Bolivarian process has promoted the organization of workers like nothing has before. However, this rise of the unions has not meant their greater influence on labor policies. One indicator is the end of the discussion of collective contracts in the public sector, with 243 expired, paralyzed and unsigned contracts at the end of 2007, in a sector that in May 2009 employs 2,244,413 people, a quarter of those employed by the private sector.

The decisions on salaries, labor conditions, and labor law are made unilaterally by the institutions of the state, after which they are mechanically ratified by the spokespersons of the UNT. In addition to the fragmentation and loss of capacity for pressure and negotiation, union parallelism has exacerbated the disputes for control of workplaces in the areas of oil and construction—in which the union can place 70 out of 100 recruits. This has increased the cases of assassination of union leaders and workers in inter-union strife. Between June 2008 and when this text was written, there have been 59 murders, that spread with the greatest impunity.

A third element is the creation of the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV), a partisan body that, in president’s own words, should absorb all organizations that support the Bolivarian process, including the unions. A few defended the independence of the workers’ organizations, but dissent from the official line was not tolerated. In March of 2007 Chávez affirmed in a speech: “The unions should not be autonomous… We must end with that.” This was followed by successive declarations in the same line, reaching a zenith in March of 2009, when after ridiculing the demands of the basic industries of Guayana—the biggest industrial belt of the country—Chávez threatened to use the police to crush any attempts at demonstrations or strikes there. For a revolutionary like Orlando Chirino, it was unbearable. He stated at the time that it “constituted a declaration of war against the working class.”

Various initiatives are currently being developed to increase control over the country’s workers. For one thing, laws have been passed that limit and criminalize protest, requiring people to report periodically to the courts, in addition to prohibiting them from participation in meetings and demonstrations—such as occurred this past July 13 to five union leaders of the oil refinery of El Palito, in the west of the country. [The five refinery workers received a judicial order barring them from “promoting or initiating assemblies, gatherings or meetings that place in risk the normal functioning of installations of the petroleum complex.”]

According to spokespersons of the affected communities, at least 2,200 people would be currently subject to this scheme. It must be brought out that, curiously, more than 80% are part of the movement to support the national government. This detail is significant because since 2008 there has been increasing social unrest in the face of the miseries and limitations of material life for workers on the ground. The protests for social rights have displaced the mobilizations for political rights, that set the scene during the years 2002 and 2006. The failure to meet the expectations generated by Bolivarian rhetoric, the weakening of patronage networks by declining oil revenues, and the stagnation and decline of populist social policies (known as “missions”) have catalyzed the accumulated discontent in the absence of profound transformations to significantly improve the quality of life for the majority of the country.

Another initiative underway, again by decree from above, is the replacement of unions with “workers’ councils” for discussing working conditions in companies, a proposal entered in the reform of the Organic Labor Law (LOT) that has been discussed in secret in the National Assembly, a body that is promoted around the world as a champion of “participatory democracy.”

Other laws, that seem to have no connection to the world of work, have also been restricting workers’ rights. That’s the case with the reformed Law of Land Transit, which in its article 74 prohibits the closure of streets to obstruct pedestrian and vehicle traffic—the historical practice of protest by the popular sectors, especially in demanding their labor rights.

Meanwhile, on August 15 an Organic Law of Education was passed, which has provoked protest by opposition groups for its secularism and for establishing strict regulations for private education institutions. However, what this center-right and social-democratic opposition does not question—much less Chavismo—are the limitations to the right of association, unionization, and collective bargaining, which is not guaranteed [to education workers]. One sign of the reactionary character of the order is section 5.f of the first provision, which states that teachers and professors engage in serious misconduct “by physical aggression, speech, and other forms of violence” against their superiors. To make matters worse, the fifth provision regulates the use of scabs “for reasons of proven necessity” in order to break strikes and work stoppages—a practice that has become habitual in so-called “Bolivarian Venezuela.”

In addition, the Chavista movement has unleashed an onslaught against media outlets that don’t accommodate the government, whose principal concern is the visibility of the conflicts and protests that they provide in contrast to the scarce coverage of the state and para-state media—self-declared as “alternative and community,” but without editorial and financial independence of any kind.

The role of Venezuelan anarchists in this moment of fracture of Bolivarian hegemony is to participate, accompany, and radicalize the conflicts, from below and with the people—and in this way to stimulate the recovery of the belligerent autonomy of the social movements. They must also become actively involved in the construction of a different, revolutionary alternative to the inter-bourgeois conflict for the control of the oil revenues that has engulfed the political scene in recent years, fighting the Bolivarian bourgeoisie in power with the same impetus as the potential rearticulation of those political parties it has displaced. In this way we walk, as always, without giving any concession to power and having our old values—self-management, direct action, anti-capitalism and mutual aid—as a bright horizon.

—-

Rafael Uzcátegui is a member of Venezuela’s anarcho-punk community, and a contributor to the Caracas anarchist journal El Libertario.

This article first appeared in the October issue of Tierra y Libertad, publication of the Iberian Anarchist Federation. Our translation is adapted from one that appears on the A-Infos anarchist news service.

Sources:

“Defendiendo el derecho a la protesta social,” from Rafael Uzcátegui’s website, July 28, 2009 (on the unrest at El Palito refinery)

From our Daily Report:

Venezuela: two workers shot in plant sit-in
World War 4 Report, Feb. 3, 2009

Venezuela: three unionists murdered
World War 4 Report, Dec. 2, 2008

Venezuela: Human Rights Watch delegation expelled
World War 4 Report, Sept. 20, 2008

Venezuela: “operational emergency” in oil sector?
World War 4 Report, July 25, 2007

See also:

VENEZUELA’S CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM:
A Threat to What Was Won Through Struggle
from El Libertario, Caracas
World War 4 Report, December 2007

——————-

Reprinted by World War 4 Report, November 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingVENEZUELAN LABOR BETWEEN CHAVEZ AND THE GOLPISTAS 

IRAQI LABOR LEADERS SPEAK

Their Fight for Workers and Against Occupation

from Building Bridges, WBAI Radio

On October 5, “Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report,” hosted by Mimi Rosenberg and Ken Nash on New York’s non-commercial WBAI Radio, ran an interview with four Iraqi labor leaders who were on the East Coast on a tour sponsored by US Labor Against the War: Hassan Jumaa, president of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions; Rasim Awadi, president of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers; Sardar Mohammed, president of the Iraqi Kurdish Workers Syndicates & Unions; and Falah Alwan, president of the Federation of Workers Councils & Unions in Iraq. They spoke about the struggle for workers rights under occupation and the prospects for rebuilding Iraq’s industrial sector—and expressed sometimes divergent views on how and when the US should withdraw.

Mimi Rosenberg: Now, a Building Bridges exclusive. Iraq labor federation leaders share their views and stories on the conditions workers face on the ground, their struggles against privatization, and their perspectives on the United States occupation of their country. Why don’t we begin with our first guest, who we welcome to New York…

Rasim Awadi: Yes, I am the head of the General Federation of Iraqi Workers, which groups workers from all the provinces. In 1987, Saddam shut down all labor unions in the public sector. Right after the occupation, a lot of the factories were shut down, and remain closed to this day, not operating. So we have a limited number of members in our union. We had a conference right after [the invasion] in 2003, with a representative from the Ministry of Labor, and we held elections in all our locals. There were other unions that were formed after 2003, among them the labor union in Kurdistan, which we have a great relationship with.

There are only six labor unions operating in Iraq, because of the fact that the law still forbids union organization in the public sector. Our activity is still being hampered, our union workers are oppressed by the actual regime. Since all the funds that belonged to the previous trade unions were frozen by the [Saddam] government, our financial situation is dire, and we operate on a shoestring budget.

Falah Alwan: The situation of the workers’ movement in Iraq is a part of the situation of the whole society. Our society is a society under occupation—despite the lies of the security argument and other pretexts. We are suffering from a devastation of the fundamental structure of society—industry, the health sector, the education sector. The authorities cannot impose their law because of the hegemony of the militias in many provinces.

After the fall of Saddam, the workers organizations tried to rebuild—or rather, to build, because before that we had no real unions. The union federation in the Saddam era was a part of the state, it imposed the policies of the regime on the workers. But after [the invasion], we created our organizing committees in many sectors. Our federation held its first congress in December 2003. But the workers are still not one of the main powers in society—despite the fact that there are about 5 million workers in Iraq. If we count them with their families, there are 20 million. So they are the majority of the society. But they have no significant political role in events. Society is polarized according to religion, according to tribe, according to language—but not polarized according to class.

Ken Nash: Maybe now we should hear from the representative of the Kurdish unions…

Sardar Mohammed: In Kurdistan, we began labor union organizing after 1991 [when Kurdistan became autonomous], holding elections in our workplaces—including the public sector. The democratic political system in Kurdistan allowed us to overcome that hurdle. We have nine branches of our union across Kurdistan. However, that law [barring unionization of the public sector] is still in effect, and could be enforced in any part of Iraq. That law was never abolished.

We enjoy more freedom than in the rest of Iraq; we can organize, we can publish, we educate the workers in a democratic way. And we are trying to create a national federation with the other unions in Iraq, in order to push for a better law for the Iraqi workers. This is our struggle, we have to fight for our rights.

Ken Nash: Let’s hear from our friend from the oil workers union. I think our listeners would like to hear about the struggle against the oil privatization in Iraq.

Hassan Jumaa: I am the head of the labor union in the oil sector in Iraq. I want to emphasize the fact that we do not enjoy any protected rights under the existing laws in Iraq. We share the same problems and the same suffering as other workers in Iraq. We don;t have social security, we don’t have health plans, any benefits.

But we are one of the strongest unions, because we are in a sector that makes up 80% of Iraq’s economy. We know well the reason for the invasion and occupation of Iraq—its resources, and specifically the oil. And we struggle along side our fellow workers in other sectors of the economy in order to protect Iraq’s resources. All the sectors are in solidarity on this point; they all understand that the oil resources and revenues belong to all Iraqis, from the north to the south. We are all concerned about the dangers that the oil sector faces. We all know and understand that our salvation comes from these oil resources. Oil revenues could be used to rebuild Iraq. Therefore all the Iraqi trade unions have their reservations about the new Iraqi oil law and the current licensing of oil contracts to foreign entities. And we discuss with workers in other sectors the future and outcome of these privatizations and what they will mean for the Iraqi worker.

Mimi Rosenberg: Do the workers in Iraq see themselves as a collective force to assume power in society?

Hassan Jumaa: We hope that we can achieve that point. The working class in Iraq is a very powerful one, if given the chance it could be in the leadership position. But we’re not there yet.

Rasim Awadi: The workers nearly took power in 1959. One day after the May Day celebrations in 1959, the head of the CIA said that Iraq was now the most dangerous country in the world, because the workers were calling for power. But now the workers are more loyal to the political parties than to the unions. Some 75% of the workers belong to one of the religious political parties.

In the 1960s, even the nationalist parties, under the pressure of the working class in Iraq, adopted many reforms that were favorable to the workers. The workers were calling for power, so even the nationalist parties adopted the slogans of the workers at that time, and pretended to be socialists. But today the political powers in Iraq work to limit our activities, to prevent us from taking a leadership role.

Mimi Rosenberg: What are the effects of the occupation on being able to advance the interests of the workers in your respective unions?

Hassan Jumaa: The occupation destroyed the entire industrial infrastructure in Iraq. Nearly all the factories are not functioning. There is 50% unemployment. The only sector that is still viable is the oil sector, and there is still some leather and textile production.

Even in the port of Basra, the occupation gave concessions to foreign companies to operate the port authority, which caused the Iraqi workers there to start demonstrating and demanding their jobs back. All the arms factories, which constituted a major industry in Iraq, were closed by the occupation. They could have been converted to help rebuild the country. This decision cost the Iraqis billions of dollars. Those who govern Iraq are not Iraqis, but the Americans.

Mimi Rosenberg: What is the message of the Iraqi labor movement to President Obama and the Americans?

Hassan Jumaa: We ask President Obama and the American people to push for the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. And we ask the American people for help in rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure and economy. Because all the companies that Bush brought to Iraq only looted the country. The love for the American people in Iraq is down to zero. We value the solidarity of working-class people in the US. But we believe that the troop withdrawal is not true, it’s a fallacy. We want Iraq to be governed by Iraqis, by workers and people who stand in solidarity with workers.

Mimi Rosenberg: We are often told that there is still an issue of security, so we can’t take all the troops out without jeopardizing the security of the people of Iraq. What is your response to this?

Hassan Jumaa: In our view, Iraqis after the withdrawal of American troops will be able to govern themselves.

Rasim Awadi: If there was an immediate and unplanned withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, there could be a shift in power that might put us in jeopardy. The US violated the Geneva Conventions and all the international treaties that put the responsibility on the occupier to protect the civilian population. Instead, the US promoted the coming [to power] of those militias and the factional fighting on our territory.

Mimi Rosenberg: There seems to be a different of opinion here. So I ask our friend from the oil workers, what do you think needs to be done to address this chaotic situation created by the US invasion?

Hassan Jumaa: After the Americans leave, Iraqis will be free to choose who will lead them. The US is responsible for the sectarianism that exists today. Because when the US invaded and dismantled the old regime, the new regime that the US created was based on sectarianism.

I want to give an example about the responsibility of the US forces. After the bombing of the holy shrine [at Samarra’s Golden Mosque in February 2006] that caused the sectarian war, the US forces disappeared from the streets for more than a week, in a very bad siuation of conflict between the people. And we know that in governorates like Nassiriya, where there are no occupying US forces, there is no conflict. The security situation is better there than in other provinces of Iraq. That means the security in Iraq is not provided by the US military.

So I believe another force, like the UN, can provide security for the Iraqi people. A withdrawal of US forces will create a better situation for our society.

Mimi Rosenberg: Well, I thank you, and I want to say that there are many people in this country that really do support the self-determination of our sisters and brothers in Iraq, and we will try make sure that your message is heard more here.

———

Resources:

Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions
http://www.basraoilunion.org/

General Federation of Iraqi Workers
http://www.iraqitradeunions.org/

Federation of Workers’ Councils and Unions in Iraq
http://fwcui.org/

Building Bridges: Your Community & Labor Report
http://www.buildingbridgesradio.blogspot.com/

US Labor Against the War
http://www.uslaboragainstwar.org/

See also:

IRAQ’S CIVIL RESISTANCE
The Secular Left Opposition Stands Up
by Bill Weinberg, WW4 Report
World War 4 Report, January 2008

VOICES OF IRAQI OIL WORKERS
Oil & Utility Union Leaders on the Struggle Against Privatization
from Building Bridges, WBAI Radio
World War 4 Report, July 2007

From our Daily Report:

Iraq: Basra oil pipeline workers score labor victory
World War 4 Report, May 9, 2009

—————————-

Reprinted and transcribed by World War 4 Report, November 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

Continue ReadingIRAQI LABOR LEADERS SPEAK 

WHITHER WORLD WAR 4 REPORT?

Dear readers:

This upcoming 9-11 anniversary will mark eight years that World War 4 Report has been publishing. We have only kept it going because nobody else is doing it, and we consider it vital: a daily digest of the GWOT news from around the world, with exacting journalistic standards and a progressive neither/nor perspective equally unsparing on imperialism and the jihad. But we have to face the fact that is has utterly failed to accrue a significant readership—at least in numerical terms.

Continue ReadingWHITHER WORLD WAR 4 REPORT? 

BEYOND ATTICA

The Untold Story of Women’s Resistance Behind Bars

Book Review:
RESISTANCE BEHIND BARS
The Struggles of Incarcerated Women
by Victoria Law
PM Press, 2009

by Hans Bennett, AlterNet

“When I was 15, my friends started going to jail,” says Victoria Law, a native New Yorker. “Chinatown’s gangs were recruiting in the high schools in Queens and, faced with the choice of stultifying days learning nothing in overcrowded classrooms or easy money, many of my friends had dropped out to join a gang.”

“One by one,” Law recalls, “they landed in Rikers Island, an entire island in New York City devoted to pretrial detainment for those who can not afford bail.”

Law shares this and other recollections in her new book, Resistance Behind Bars: The Struggles of Incarcerated Women. At 16, she herself decided to join a gang, but was arrested for the armed robbery that she committed for her initiation into the gang. “Because it was my first arrest—and probably because 16-year-old Chinese girls who get straight A’s in school did not seem particularly menacing—I was eventually let off with probation,” she writes.

Before her release from jail, Law was held in the “Tombs” awaiting arraignment. While the adult women she met there had all been arrested for prostitution, she also met three teenagers arrested for unarmed assault. “Two of the girls were black lesbian lovers. In a scenario that would be repeated 13 years later in the case of the New Jersey Four, they had been out with friends when they encountered a cab driver who had tried to grab one of them. Her friends intervened, the cab driver called the police and the girls were arrested for assault.” Law notes that “both of my cellmates were subsequently sent to Rikers Island.”

These early experiences, coupled with her later discovery of radical politics, pushed Law “to think about who goes to prison and why.” She got involved in several projects to support prisoners, which included helping to start Books Through Bars in New York City, sending free books to prisoners. In college, she “began researching current prisoner organizing and resistance,” and upon discovering almost zero documentation of resistance from women prisoners, she began her own documentation and directly contacted women prisoners who were resisting. A college paper became a widely distributed pamphlet, and at the request of several women prisoners she’d corresponded with, Law helped to publish their writings in a zine called Tenacious: Art and Writings from Women in Prison. Law writes that the zine and pamphlet “heightened awareness not only about incarcerated women’s issues, but also women’s actions to challenge and change the injustices they faced on a daily basis.”

“This book is the result of seven and a half years of reading, writing, listening, and supporting women in prison,” Law says about Resistance Behind Bars, noting that each chapter in her book “focuses on an issue that women themselves have identified as important.” The chapters include topics as diverse as health care, the relationship between mothers and daughters, sexual abuse, education, and resistance among women in immigration detention. Resistance Behind Bars paints a picture of women prisoners resisting a deeply flawed prison system, which Law hopes will help to empower both the women held in cages and those on the outside working to support them.

Who Goes to Prison?
Since 1970, the US prison population has skyrocketed, from 300,000 to over 2.3 million. According to the US Justice Department, this staggering increase has not resulted from a rise in crime. Since 1993, the prison population has increased by over one million, but during this same period, both property offenses and serious violent crime have been steadily declining.

The New York Times recently cited a 2008 report by the International Center for Prison Studies at King’s College London documenting that the US has more prisoners than any other country. Furthermore, with 751 out of 100,000 people, and one out of every 100 adults in prison or jail, the US also has the highest incarceration rate in the world. With only five percent of the world’s population, the US has almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners.

While women comprise only nine percent of the U.S. prison population, their numbers have been increasing at a faster rate than men. As Law documents, “between 1990 and 2000, the number of women in prison rose 108 percent, from 44,065 to 93,234. (The male prison population grew 77 percent during that same time period.) By the end of 2006, 112,498 women were behind bars.”

Like with male incarceration rates, women behind bars are disproportionately low-income and people of color. Law writes that “only 40 percent of all incarcerated women had been employed full-time before incarceration. Of those, most had held low-paying jobs: a study of women under supervision (prison, jail, parole or probation) found that two-thirds had never held a job that paid more than $6.50 per hour. Approximately 37 percent earned less than $600 per month.”

A 2007 Bureau of Justice study documented that 358 of every 100,000 Black women, 152 of every 100,000 Latinas, and 94 of every 100,000 white women are incarcerated. Explaining this racial discrepancy, Law argues that inner-city Black and Latino neighborhoods are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement. She cites a 2005 US Department of Justice study which concluded that Blacks and Latinos are “three times as likely as whites to be searched, arrested, threatened or subdued with force when stopped by the police.”

The so-called “War on Drugs” has played a key role in the growth of the US prison population. Law writes about the impact of New York State’s Rockefeller Drug Laws passed in 1973, “which required a sentence of 15 years to life for anyone convicted of selling two ounces or possessing four ounces of a narcotic, regardless of circumstances or prior history. That year, only 400 women were imprisoned in New York State. As of January 1, 2001, there were 3,133. Over 50 percent had been convicted of a drug offense and 20 percent were convicted solely of possession. Other states passed similar laws, causing the number of women imprisoned nationwide for drug offenses to rise 888 percent from 1986 to 1996.”

Distinguishing women prisoners from their male counterparts, Law cites a Bureau of Justice study which “found that women were three times more likely than men to have been physically or sexually abused prior to incarceration.”

Women Prisoners Don’t Resist?
The central thesis of Resistance Behind Bars is truly profound. In clear, non-academic language, Law argues that recent scholarship documenting and radically criticizing the increased incarceration rates and mistreatment of women prisoners “largely ignores what the women themselves do to change or protest these circumstances, thus reinforcing the belief that incarcerated women do not organize.” Alongside academia, Law also harshly criticizes radical prison activists, arguing that “just as the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s downplayed the role of women in favor of highlighting male spokesmen and leaders, the prisoners’ rights movement has focused and continues to focus on men to speak for the masses.”

Law gives honorable mention to two books that documented women’s resistance at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State: Juanita Diaz-Cotto’s Gender, Ethnicity, and the State (1996) and the collectively written Breaking the Walls of Silence: AIDS and Women in a New York State Maximum Security Prison (1998). Since these two books “no other book-length work has focused on incarcerated women’s activism and resistance,” writes Law. As a result, Law argues that women prisoners “lack a commonly known history of resistance. While male prisoners can draw on the examples of George Jackson, the Attica uprising and other well-publicized cases of prisoner activism, incarcerated women remain unaware of precedents relevant to them.”

Epitomizing the scholarship that Law criticizes, author Virginia High Brislin wrote that “women inmates themselves have called very little attention to their situations,” and “are hardly ever involved in violent encounters with officials (i.e. riots), nor do they initiate litigation as often as do males in prison.”

To challenge Brislin’s assertion, Law gives numerous examples of women rioting and initiating litigation, including the “August Rebellion” in 1974 at Bedford Hills Correctional Facility in New York State. On July 2, 1974, prisoner Carol Crooks won a lawsuit against prison authorities, with the court “issuing a preliminary injunction, prohibiting the prison from placing women in segregation without 24-hour notice and a hearing of these charges,” writes Law. In response, “five male guards beat Crooks and placed her in segregation. Her fellow prisoners protested by holding seven staff members hostage for two and a half hours. However, ‘the August Rebellion’ is virtually unknown today despite that fact that male state troopers and (male) guards from men’s prisons were called to suppress the uprising, resulting in 25 women being injured and 24 women being transferred to Matteawan Complex for the Criminally Insane without the required commitment hearings.”

Law also criticizes author Karlene Faith, who acknowledges that women resist, but who wrote that in the 1970s, women prisoners “were not as politicized as the men [prisoners], and they did not engage in the kinds of protest actions that aroused media attention.” To challenge Faith’s argument, Law cites several rebellions that received significant media attention, including one that the New York Times wrote two stories about. As Law recounts, “in 1975, women at the North Carolina Correctional Center for Women held a sit-down demonstration to demand better medical care, improved counseling services, and the closing of the prison laundry. When prison guards attempted to end the protest by herding the women into the gymnasium and beating them, the women fought back, using volleyball net poles, chunks of concrete and hoe handles to drive the guards out of the prison. Over 100 guards from other prisons were summoned to quell the rebellion.”

In light of the many such stories documented in Resistance Behind Bars, Law argues that “instead of claiming that women in prison did not engage in riots and protest actions that captured media attention, scholars and researchers should examine why these acts of organizing fail to attract the same critical and scholarly attention as that given to similar male actions.”

Resisting With Media-Activism
In the chapter “Grievances, Lawsuits, and the Power of the Media,” Law observes that “gaining media attention often gains quicker results than filing lawsuits.” Among the many organizing victories that were significantly aided by media attention, in 1999, Nightline focused on conditions at California’s Valley State Prison for Women. Law explains that “after prisoner after prisoner told Nightline anchor Ted Koppel about being given a pelvic exam as ‘part of the treatment’ for any ailment, including stomach problems or diabetes, Koppel asked the prison’s chief medical officer Dr. Anthony DiDomenico, for an explanation.”

DiDomenico was apparently so confident that he would not be held accountable for his misconduct, that he answered Koppel by saying “I’ve heard inmates tell me they would deliberately like to be examined. It’s the only male contact they get.” After this interview was aired, DiDomenico was reassigned to a desk job, and as of 2001 he had been criminally indicted, along with a second doctor.

Demonstrating the power of this media coverage, Law notes that the “prisoner advocacy organization Legal Services for Prisoners with Children had been reporting the prisoners’ complaints about medical staff’s sexual misconduct to the CDC for four years with no result.”

Along with agitating for coverage in the mainstream media, women prisoners have also created their own media projects. The chapter titled “Breaking The Silence: Incarcerated Women’s Media” documents many important projects. Law explains that these projects are necessary because women prisoners’ “voices and stories still remain unheard by both mainstream and activist-oriented media. Articles about both prison conditions and prisoners often portray the male prisoner experience, ignoring the different issues facing women in prison.” Therefore, “women’s acts of writing—and publishing—often serve a dual purpose: they challenge existing stereotypes and distortions of prisoners and prison life, framing and correcting prevailing (mis) perceptions. They also boost women’s sense of self-worth and agency in a system designed to not only isolate and alienate its prisoners but also erase all traces of individuality.”

Some activist-oriented publications have been receptive and have published prisoners’ writings. From 1999 until its final issue in 2002, the radical feminist magazine Sojourner: A Women’s Forum featured a section on women prisoner issues which included writings from the prisoners themselves. Law writes that this section, entitled “Inside/Outside” covered many topics, including “working conditions in women’s facilities, the dehumanizing treatment of children visiting their mothers, and prisoner suicides.

Law spotlights many different projects. From 2002 to 2006, Perceptions was a monthly newspaper published by and for the women at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey. Because of censorship from prison warden Charlotte Blackwell, Perceptions was forced to limit its criticism of the prison, but the women published what they could. For example, in one issue, women wrote about how they would run the prison differently if they were in charge. Law notes that “their fantasies revealed the absence of programming for older women and those in the maximum custody unit, emergency counseling and therapeutic interventions and opportunities for mother-child interactions. It also drew attention to the facility’s overcrowding and increased potentials for violence and conflict among prisoners.”

Tenacious, the zine published by Law, was initiated by women prisoners who sought the help of friends outside the prison to actually publish and distribute it. “Free from the need to seek administrative approval, incarcerated women wrote about the difficulties of parenting from prison, dangerously inadequate health care, sexual assault by prison staff and the scarcity of educational and vocational opportunities, especially in comparison to their male counterparts. Although circulation remained small, the women’s stories provoked public response,” writes Law.

“Prison officials do whatever they can to strip prisoners of their dignity and self-worth,” stated Barrilee Bannister, one of the founders of Tenacious. “Writing is my way to escape the confines of prison and the debilitating ailments of prison life. It’s me putting on boxing gloves and stepping into the rink of freedom of speech and opinion.”

Arguing for Prison Abolition
When Victoria Law was first introduced to radical politics, shortly after her own stint behind bars, she “discovered groups and literature espousing prison abolition.”

“These analyses—coupled with what I had seen firsthand—made sense, steering me to work towards the dismantling, rather than the reform, of the prison system.” Law’s subsequent research has only served to affirm her belief in the need for abolition. She states clearly that “this book should not be mistaken for a call for more humane or ‘gender responsive’ prisons.”

Some readers may view Law’s prison abolitionist politics as being abstract or overly theoretical. However, to support her abolitionist viewpoint, she makes the practical argument that prisons simply don’t work to reduce crime or increase public safety. She writes that “incarceration has not decreased crime; instead, ‘tough on crime’ policies have led to the criminalization … of more activities, leading to higher rates of arrest, prosecution and incarceration while shifting money and resources away from other public entities, such as education, housing, health care, drug treatment, and other societal supports. The growing popularity of abolitionist thought can be seen in the expansion of organizations such as Critical Resistance, an organization fighting to end the need for a prison-industrial complex, and the formation of groups working to address issues of crime and victimization without relying on the police or prisons.”

Towards the end of Resistance Behind Bars, Law quotes Angela Y. Davis, who is a leading activist intellectual of the prison abolitionist movement. In her recent book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis writes that “a major challenge of this movement is to do the work that will create more human, habitable environments for people in prison without bolstering the permanence of the prison system. How, then, do we accomplish this balancing act of passionately attending to the needs of prisoners—calling for less violent conditions, an end to sexual assault, improved physical and mental health care, greater access to drug programs, better educational work opportunities, unionization of prison labor, more connections with families and communities, shorter or alternative sentencing—and at the same time call for alternatives to sentencing altogether, no more prison construction, and abolitionist strategies that question the place of the prison in our future?”

As if answering Davis’ question, Law concludes that while striving for prison abolition “we need to also reach in, make contact with those who have been isolated by prison walls and societal indifference and listen to those who are speaking out, like many of the women who have shared their stories within this book. Because abolishing prisons will not happen tomorrow, next week or even next year, we need to break through these barriers, communicate, work with and support women who are in resistance today.”

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Hans Bennett is an independent multi-media journalist whose website is Insubordination

This review first appeared July 21 on AlterNet.

RESOURCES

Books Through Bars
http://www.booksthroughbars.org/

U.S. prison population dwarfs that of other nations
New York Times, April 23, 2008

Bureau of Justice Statistics—Facts at a Glance
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/glance.htm#Corrections

King’s College Prison Briefs
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/worldbrief…

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Reprinted by World War 4 Report, Aug. 1, 2009
Reprinting permissible with attribution

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