Writing by Benjamin Dangl

Forthcoming Book: Dancing with Dynamite

My new book will be published by AK Press this July! You can pre-order it now.

Please email me if you would like to review the book, interview me about it, or host a book tour event.

Here is the book description:

Grassroots social movements played a major role in electing new left-leaning governments throughout Latin America, but subsequent relations between the streets and the states remain uneasy. In Dancing with Dynamite, Benjamin Dangl explores the complex ways these movements have worked with, against, and independently of national governments.

Recent years have seen the resurgence of worker cooperatives, anti-privatization movements, land occupations, and other strategies used by Latin Americans to confront economic crises. Using original research, lively prose, and extensive interviews with farmers, activists, and politicians, Dangl suggests how these tactics could be applied internationally to combat the exploitation of workers and natural resources. He looks at movements across the Americas, drawing parallels between factory takeovers in Argentina and Chicago and battles over water rights in Bolivia and Detroit. At the same time, he analyzes recurring problems faced by social movements, contextualizes them geopolitically, and points to practical examples for building a better world now.

Bolivia’s Next Steps

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Published in The Nation on December 16, 2009

A rainbow of campaign posters covered the stairways and tinted glass walls in the Bolivian Congress building. After arriving in the crowded office lobby of leftist Congressman Gustavo Torrico, I sat for hours next to union leaders and other rank-and-file constituents, waiting to speak with the politician.

Torrico was meeting with members of the Bolivian Workers Center, one of the largest unions in the country. When I finally sat down on the couch in his dimly lit office, the smiling Congressman explained one of the key reasons for the success of the Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), the party he and indigenous President Evo Morales helped construct.

Click here to read the full article

The Speed of Change: Bolivian President Empowered by Re-Election

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Tuesday, 08 December 2009

First published in Toward Freedom

Bolivian President Evo Morales was re-elected on Sunday, December 6th in a landslide victory. After the polls closed, fireworks, music and celebrations filled the Plaza Murillo in downtown La Paz where Morales supporters chanted “Evo Again! Evo Again!” Addressing the crowd from the presidential palace balcony, Morales said, “The people, with their participation, showed once again that it’s possible to change Bolivia… We have the responsibility to deepen and accelerate this process of change.”

Though the official results are not yet known, exit polls show that Morales won roughly 63% of the vote, with his closest rival, former conservative governor Manfred Reyes Villa, winning around 23% of the vote.

The Movement Toward Socialism (MAS), Morales’ political party, also won over two thirds of the seats in the lower house and the senate, meaning the MAS administration will have an easier time passing laws without right wing opposition.

Many of Bolivia’s indigenous and impoverished majority identify with Morales, an indigenous man who grew up poor and was a grassroots leader before his election as president in 2005. Many also voted for Morales because of new government programs aimed at empowering the country’s marginalized people.

“Brother Evo Morales is working for the poorest people, for the people that are fighting for their survival,” El Alto street vendor Julio Fernandez told Bloomberg reporter Jonathan Levin on election day.

“He’s changing things. He’s helping the poor and building highways and schools,” Veronica Canizaya, a 49-year old housewife, told Reuters before voting near Lake Titicaca.

During his first four years in office Morales partially nationalized Bolivia’s vast gas reserves, ushered in a new constitution written in a constituent assembly, granted more rights to indigenous people and exerted more state-control over natural resources and the economy. Much of the wealth generated from new state-run industries has been directed to various social and development programs to benefit impoverished sectors of society.

For example, Inez Mamani receives a government stipend to help her care for her newborn baby. The funding is thanks to the state-run gas company. Mamani, who also has five other children, spoke with Annie Murphy of National Public Radio about the program. “With my other children, there wasn’t a program like this. It was sad the way we raised them. Now they have milk, clothing, diapers, and it’s great that the government helps us. Before, natural resources were privately owned and there wasn’t this sort of support.”

In addition to the support for mothers, the government also gives stipends to young students and the elderly; the stipends reached some 2 million people in 2009. “I’m a teacher and I see that the kids go to school with hope, because they get breakfast there and the subsidies … I ask them how they spend the hand-outs and some of them say they buy shoes. Some didn’t have shoes before,” Irene Paz told Reuters after voting in El Alto.

Thanks to such far-reaching government programs and socialistic policies, Bolivia’s economic growth has been higher during the four years under Morales than at any other period during the last three decades, according to the Washington-based Center for Economic and Policy Research.

“None of this would have been possible without the government’s regaining control of the country’s natural resources,” said CEPR Co-Director Mark Weisbrot. “Bolivia’s fiscal stimulus over the past year was vastly larger than ours in the United States, relative to their economy.”

During Morales’ new term in office, with over two thirds control in both houses of congress, the MAS government should be able to further apply the changes established in the new constitution, a document passed in a national vote this past January. The MAS base is eager for land reform, broader access to public services, development projects and more say in how their government is run. The mandate and demands for massive changes are now greater than ever.

As Bolivian political analyst Franklin Pareja told IPS News, “In the past four years, the change was an illusion, and now it should be real.”

Democracy in Honduras: Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Wednesday, 09 December 2009

First published by Toward Freedom

Before right wing candidate Porfirio Lobo was pronounced the winner of the November 29 elections in Honduras, one senior US official spoke anonymously to reporters of his administration’s position on Honduras: “What are we going to do, sit for four years and just condemn the coup?” Instead, Washington offered its pivotal blessing for the elections, allowing a bloody dictatorship to paint itself in a democratic light.

The US could have put more pressure on the coup government, refusing to recognize the elections, denouncing the human rights violations and calling, as so many other governments around the world have, for the immediate reinstatement of President Manuel Zelaya, who was ousted in a coup on June 28.

But the Obama administration decided to support the vote, which took place in a climate of repression, torture, political persecution and fear, and was marked by massive levels of abstention.

“[W]e face a militarized state with a defined and systematic practice against those who oppose the coup,” Honduran human rights activist Berta Oliva told the Real News. “[The coup leaders] have a clear objective, which is to silence and intimidate.”

On November 4, after Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a US-brokered deal to return Zelaya to power, Assistant Secretary of State for Western Affairs Tom Shannon told CNN that the US would recognize the November 29 elections regardless of whether or not Zelaya was reinstated.

Leading up to this drastic turn of events, South Carolina Republican Senator Jim DeMint had been blocking Shannon’s nomination as the ambassador to Brazil and Arturo Valenzuela as the replacement for Shannon. DeMint said he would lift the hold if Shannon established a deal for the US to recognize elections in Honduras without Zelaya’s return to power. (DeMint traveled to Honduras in October to meet with members of the coup regime.)

When Shannon changed the Honduran deal to fit DeMint’s request, the Republican Senator went ahead with his nomination of Shannon and Valenzuela to their new posts.

The US-brokered deal then called on the Honduran congress to decide Zelaya’s fate – even though the congress had approved the coup in the first place. When the vote on Zelaya’s return to finish his term in office took place on December 3, congress voted against reinstatement by 111 to 14.

Washington’s crucial support in this process helped the Honduran oligarchy carry on with their electoral farce and prevent Zelaya’s return to office. Perhaps that was the plan all along.

US Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens said the elections “will return Honduras to the path of democracy.” But many Hondurans aren’t interested in Llorens’ version of democracy.

Betty Vasquez of the Women in Resistance of Santa Bárbara, Honduras is one of many activists looking beyond the ballot box toward a popular assembly to rewrite the country’s constitution. Vasquez told Honduras Resiste, “We believe that the State powers have been so weakened that only through a constitutional assembly could a new democratic process be initiated.”

Turning Activists into Voters in Uruguay: Frente Amplio and José Mujica

Written by Benjamin Dangl

December 3, 2009

Torrential rain didn’t keep voters away from the polls on Sunday, November 29th when José “Pepe” Mujica was elected president with 52% of the vote. The 74-year-old Agricultural Minister spent 14 years in jail for his participation in the Tupamaro guerilla movement, and has pledged to continue the policies of his predecessor, current left-leaning president Tabaré Vásquez. Mujica also promised that while president, he would return to his farm outside the capital city at least 5 hours a week to tend his flowers and vegetables.

“It’s the model of Lula,” Alfredo Garcé of the University of the Republic in Montevideo said of Mujica’s strategy. “To win the elections [in Brazil] he put on an Armani suit and said he wanted a government of the left but moderate to permit a political economy respectful of capitalism.” Garcé said, before the results of Sunday’s election were known, “It’s not Mujica they were voting for – he will win because of the party.”[1]

However charismatic and popular Mujica is, he owes a lot to the Frente Amplio (Broad Front), a political party that over its nearly 40 years in existence has transformed the political and social landscape of the country, from the grassroots to the presidential palace.

The Frente Amplio’s Long Road

The Frente Amplio (FA) began as a broad coalition of leftists that pulled together the Christian Democrat, Socialist and Communist parties of the country in 1971. At the very beginning the FA founders said the “fundamental objective of Frente Amplio is permanent political action and not electoral competition.” As part of that direction, the FA began nation-wide networks of base committees to open up the political process to more people, allowing for direct democracy from below, fewer political intermediaries, and grassroots power over decisions within the FA as a movement.[2] Two primary goals of the FA from the start were land reform and a stronger public sector. The coalition faced widespread repression under the dictatorship, which began in 1973. After surviving this period, it emerged as a political force after the dictatorship ended in 1984. The Uruguayan left and the FA’s base committees continued to grow throughout the 1980s.[3]

The Uruguayan left was further sparked to action in a movement for justice regarding the dictatorship, an issue many people united behind in 1986 when a “law of impunity” was passed, protecting the dictatorship’s members. This human rights movement participated in a referendum to get rid of the law; 25% of voters’ signatures were needed to convoke this referendum. Uruguayan analyst Raúl Zibechi writes, “To achieve this, neighborhood activists combed the country, going house-to-house, to dialogue with neighbors and explain what the law was about and to ask for their signatures. Some 30,000 activists participated in the door-to-door campaign. They visited 80% of Uruguay’s households; spoke with over one million people; and in some cases had to return two, three and even seven times to obtain a signature.” Though the referendum failed (42% were against the law, 52% were for it) it led many activists to become more familiar with their country, their fellow citizens, and to achieve a political presence in rural areas. This development also aided in the electoral advances of the Uruguayan left.[4]

The momentum of these years resulted in part in the election of Tabaré Vázquez as the mayor of Montevideo, the capital city, in 1989. When Vásquez took office in 1990 he established a broad network of organizations and methods to bring participation from the people into the local government. Communal councils were designed to actively monitor government operations, participate in budget-making, as well as design projects, and consider laws and policies at the grassroots level.[5]

Another event that empowered the Uruguayan left was a referendum organized in 1992 regarding a law that would have put the national telephone company and other public-run services under private control. The referendum politicized people, spread awareness and galvanized movements and unions against the legislation. As a result, 72% of the population voted against the law.[6]

The FA established juntas locales (local boards) as administrative and political authorities in late 1993 in each of Montevideo’s 18 districts, while the neighborhood councils were made up of 25-40 members and acted in an advisory role from the bases. Both the boards and the councils operated as an arm of the government and FA party to distribute public services, funding and deal with administrative issues. Yet typical bureaucratic and centralized power soon took over this very democratic structure, stifling and limiting participation and enthusiasm from below as the 1990s continued. Zibechi writes, “Two new structures (one political and one social) mediated the interaction between city residents and the local governments, and two parallel authorities filtered social demands, with little communication between the two. The limited power granted to the neighborhood councils, in contrast to the broad political responsibilities reserved for the local boards, discouraged social participation, as indicated by the growing rate of desertion among the councils, which in 1997 averaged 45 percent.”[7]

Leading up to the victory of the FA in the 2004 presidential elections, the National Commission in Defense of Water and Life (CNDAV) was organized in 2003 by a broad based coalition of movements, groups and organizations to fight water privatization. The CNDAV produced hundreds of thousands of signatures in October of 2003 for the plebiscite on October 31, 2004, which took place along with the national elections. In the vote, over 62% of the people voted for a constitutional change to prohibit the privatization of water and sewage systems.[8]

The base committees and the referendum helped lay the framework for the FA’s hegemony, support, and campaign network, which led to Vásquez’s election to the presidency. His chances for victory increased during a major economic crash in the country in 2002. Vásquez and the FA were seen as an alternative to the neoliberal plan which caused the crisis.[9]

In the 2004 presidential campaign, the FA prioritized policies to fight marginalization and poverty, expand healthcare and education services and increase democratic participation in the development of government policies. Yet as election day neared, the FA was willing to water down its plans in order to expand its voter base. José Mujica said, before the 2004 elections, “I do not believe that we would come to power, precisely now, on the crest of a revolutionary wave. We are almost asking permission from the bourgeoisie to let ourselves in, and we have to play the role of stabilizing the government if we get there, because we are operating under the rule of law. A government of our own will have to maneuver. And furthermore, I sincerely believe that we have many things to do before socialism. And we have to send the right signals, from an electoral point of view. What do you want me to do, scare the bourgeoisie?”[10]

The Hope of Vásquez

Vásquez was elected president in 2004. On March 1, 2005, the night Tabaré Vázquez was inaugurated President of Uruguay, a sea of people, flags and drum brigades surged through the streets of Montevideo. Fireworks pounded the air and car horns shrieked. The city bubbled with a cathartic happiness.

“Vázquez’s victory is a powerful change for Uruguay,” asserted Martin Bension, a history teacher in Montevideo. “Now the people will have more opportunities to participate in the government. Right from the foundation of the Frente Amplio, decades ago, there has been popular participation in it. The Frente makes people feel more connected, so more people become involved.”

“A lot of people died and went to jail in the seventies to win what the Frente Amplio has today,” Bension said. “Besides improvements in Uruguay, the nations of Latin America should unite – just as Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez is trying to do – in spite of our soccer rivalries!”

Bands played in the streets and people waved flags, pounded drums and drank the liquor stores dry to celebrate the inauguration. When the parties were over, much of this enthusiasm was channeled into the base committees of the FA.

Oscar Gandolo, a painter, had been active in his committee for five years. “The economy was going from bad to worse,” he recalled. “I had to do something… We have meetings every week where we get together and decide what we think the government needs to do, and cover issues that the government misses.” A couple of days after the presidential inauguration, the mood at a base committee in Montevideo was upbeat. The setting was typical of other party offices around Montevideo: a cluttered meeting room with books and political pamphlets stacked along tables, a picture of Che Guevara painted on the wall and campaign posters plastered everywhere. People filed into the room, joking, patting each other on the back and passing around yerba mate, a thick herbal tea popular in Uruguay and Argentina.

Eventually participants sat down and introduced themselves. They were carpenters, school teachers, plumbers, students, electricians, unemployed people and musicians. Some had been members of the party for decades, and others were showing up for the first time. They planned a cultural event with artists and musicians from Uruguay and Cuba. Then, after lengthy discussions, they elected a secretary, representative and treasurer. Security in the neighborhood and the condition of one of the main roads was the next topic of discussion.

Toward the end of the meeting, a long-standing member of the base committee spoke to the group: “For those who just arrived for the first time, we ask for your participation. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything about politics. You’ll learn while you’re here. With this new government in office, the responsibility of the people is greater than ever before.”

Activists and Voters of the Frente Amplio

At a dinner with businessmen at the Inter-American Development Bank, Vásquez announced that Danilo Astori would be the Minister of Economy and Finances for his government. The selection of Astori, a former leftist but at that point a proponent of neoliberalism, produced applause from the right and condemnation from the left. Astori said he would continue the economic policies of his predecessors.[11] (Astori is now vice president-elect under Mujica.)

However, Vásquez did begin a “Social Emergency Plan” which allocated $100 million to social programs and relief for economic problems in areas such as housing, food, healthcare, and jobs.[12] Once in the presidential palace, the FA administration decided to pay the country’s external debt in spite of campaign promises; the government even paid their IMF debt in advance – a far cry from demands from the FA base to send that money to social projects.[13]  In spite of these setbacks there have been improvements in the relationship between the government and social sectors in their discussion on policies regarding workers’ rights. The government has also set aside funds toward addressing the needs of the massive amounts of unemployed and impoverished in the country. [14]

Under Vásquez, poverty has dropped from its 32% level in 2004, to 20%. In addition, the Ceibal Plan was developed to give a laptop with an internet connection to every primary school student in the country, and will now expand to reach secondary school students. A tax reform was also implemented which increased taxes for wealthier citizens.[15]

However, two years into the Vásquez administration’s time in government, Argentina-based writer Marie Trigona wrote of the situation in Uruguay, “social movements have become stagnated with the crucial question of ‘what next?’”[16]

Helios Sarthou, a former FA Senator and veteran lawyer for the FA, told journalist Mike Fox, ”The issue of power is extremely serious. Companions of mine, that were together in the struggle… are today, all silent, exercising their positions in the conquest of power.”  He said that the FA has shifted from its initial grassroots strategies, leading to a situation in which “the left converted its activists in to voters.”[17]

In any case, it is thanks to those votes that Mujica will be Uruguay’s next president. Now the Frente Amplio’s long road winds on, leading to political policies Mujica himself probably wouldn’t have supported as an idealistic Tupamaro guerrilla. As he said in the days leading up to the election, “we are not waiting for paradise, above all among the older people, but trying to escape from hell and cultivate hope.”[18]

***

Benjamin Dangl is the editor of TowardFreedom.com, a progressive perspective on world events and UpsideDownWorld.org, a website on activism and politics in Latin America. He is the author of The Price of Fire: Resource Wars and Social Movements in Bolivia (AK Press) and the forthcoming book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press).

Notes:

1. Jeff Farrell, “In Uruguay, former guerrilla wins by moving away from Chávez,” Christian Science Monitor, (November 30, 2009), http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/1130/p06s04-woam.html.

2. Michael Fox, “Uruguay’s Frente Amplio,” Z Net, (June 19, 2007), http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15145.

3. Geraldine Lievesley, Reclaiming Latin America: Experiments in Radical Social Democracy, (Zed Books, 2009), 30.

4. Raúl Zibechi, Dispatches from Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism (South End Press, 2008), 135-136.

5. Center for Research on Direct Democracy, “Decentralization and Participatory Democracy in Montevideo, Uruguay: The Role of the Concejos Vecinales,”

http://www.c2d.ch/inner.php?lname=Research&table=Project&action=current&parent_id=39&link_id=1&sublinkname=current_projects.

6. Clifford Krauss, “The Welfare State Is Alive, if Besieged, in Uruguay,” New York Times, (May 3, 1998), http://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/03/world/the-welfare-state-is-alive-if-besieged-in-uruguay.html.

7. Daniel Chavez, The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn (Pluto Press, 2008), 105.

8. Public Citizen, “Uruguay Bans Water Privatization,” 2004, http://www.citizen.org/cmep/Water/cmep_Water/reports/uruguay/.

9. Mark Engler, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008), 267.

10. Daniel Chavez, The New Latin American Left: Utopia Reborn (Pluto Press, 2008), 111-112.

11. Ibid., 123.

12. Mark Engler, How to Rule the World: The Coming Battle Over the Global Economy (Nation Books, 2008), 267.

13. Michael Fox, “Uruguay’s Frente Amplio,” Z Net, (June 19, 2007), http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15145.

14. Raúl Zibechi, Dispatches from Latin America: On the Frontlines Against Neoliberalism, (South End Press, 2008), 137-138.

15. Marie Trigona, “What Does Bush Want With Uruguay?” Z Net, (March 26, 2007), http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/2882.

16. Dario Montero, “Elections – Uruguay: Landslide Victory for Former Guerilla,” IPS News, (November 30, 2009), http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=49469.

17. Michael Fox, “Uruguay’s Frente Amplio,” Z Net, (June 19, 2007), http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/15145.

18. Antonio Peredo Leigue, “El Uruguay de Pepe Mujica,” Rebelión, (October 21, 2009), http://www.rebelion.org/noticia.php?id=93699.

The Unpredictable Future: Stories From Worker-Run Factories in Argentina

Written by Benjamin Dangl

November 24, 2009

Reviewed: Sin Patron: Stories From Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, edited by Lavaca, 320 pages, Haymarket Books, 2007.

Following the social upheaval in Argentina in 2001-2002 a book was published in Spanish that a lot of activists and independent journalists in the country began trying to get their hands on. It wasn’t in all of the bookstores, but news about it traveled like wildfire. Now the legendary book, Sin Patron: Stories From Argentina’s Worker-Run Factories, is translated and available to the English-speaking world.

The book includes a number of illuminating interviews and chapters by Lavaca, a journalism collective based in Buenos Aires that continues to produce some of the best analysis and stories on social movements in the country. With Sin Patron, Lavaca brings together dynamic voices and stories from the hearts of Argentina’s inspiring movements.

The timing couldn’t be better for the release of this book in English. Readers in the US seeking creative solutions to the current economic crisis may find some helpful suggestions in Sin Patron.

Workers in Argentina during that country’s crash figured out they needed to go beyond the law to survive. “For workers in Argentina there is no law. It only exists for the powerful,” said Eduardo Murua, President of the National Movement of Reclaimed Companies. “If we were stuck outside [of the factory] asking the judge to keep it open, we would get nowhere. If we were to ask politicians, we’d get even less. Only through occupation could we recover the jobs.”

One story of occupation and worker control told in Sin Patron is that of Sime Quarry, located in the province of Entre Rios. The owners of the quarry ran the business into the ground, but it was taken over by its workers and kept in operation under worker-control. Leading up to the closure the bosses abused the workers verbally and physically. María del Huerto, 45 years old, said that in December of 2002 the bosses of the quarry “gave us a 35-day unscheduled vacation.” The “vacation” lasted until January 20th, when the workers went back to the quarry to find it abandoned. It was “a pasture with no lights, running water, or telephone service. Nothing. It was desolate,” María said. Just a few machines were left.

María met with fellow workers and members of the Movement of Recuperated Companies, and they discussed taking over the quarry themselves. They decided to arm themselves before the takeover in case they ran into any resistance. “We took firearms, and some neighbors lent us shotguns. We announced that we didn’t want to shoot anyone, but wanted to defend our workplace and keep the bosses from stealing anything else.”

It was a terribly hot time of the year and mosquitoes were everywhere. No one had any money, so they used the guns to hunt. “To eat, the men hunted apereá rabbits – they’re brown; they look like big mice. They also fished caruchas from a nearby lagoon, and Don Joaquín would send us tarpon fish from the market. What had happened to us? We thought of ourselves as middle class, and here we were, begging and hunting to make ends meet,” María said. At one point, the workers were getting so desperate they had to sell furniture in order to buy meat.

Over time, they formed a cooperative and a judge ordered the plant be given over to them in April of 2003. Now the quarry is back in business, fully operational under worker-management.

The Zanon ceramics factory was also occupied and put under worker control around the same time. Reinaldo Giménez, a long time worker at Zanon, spoke of when the business was closing down and the boss refused to pay the workers what was owed to them. The boss “put everyone in the same boat, and the workers with the longest tenures said, ‘This scumbag should have paid me. I gave him my life, but he has no feelings, no compassion, and he makes no distinctions.’”

The tension with the boss blew up, and the workers went on strike, setting up tents outside the factory, marching, picketing and organizing a communal kitchen. Local schools, workers and neighbors helped out however they could; even prisoners in jail supported the workers by donating their food. The workers reached out to the community, explaining their plight to passersby. Locals empathized with them because they were hard-working people with families. It was this connection and support from the community that helped the workers of Zanon eventually transform the factory into a cooperative. Ramírez said, “We always said the factory isn’t ours. We are using it, but it belongs to

the community.”

That’s a key message at the heart of this book – that these failed factories and businesses should belong to the people, not the wealthy bosses who mistreated workers and then abandoned ship. Such challenges to classic ideas of private property and workplace hierarchy course through every page in Sin Patron. These examples of worker management defy the bankrupt logic of capitalism itself.

Angry workers everywhere should grab a copy of Sin Patron to read of the Argentines who built new worlds when the old ones failed. As the Lavaca editors write in the introduction to their book, “The limit of all prediction is what people are capable of doing. It is not chance, but courage, that makes the future unpredictable.”

From Chile to Guatemala: A Gringo in Latin America

Reviewed: Gringo: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America, by Chesa Boudin, 240 pages, Scribner, 2009.

In Gringo: A Coming-of-Age in Latin America, Chesa Boudin writes of sleeping in a hammock on his way up the Amazon River on a 200 foot boat, working as a translator in Hugo Chavez’s presidential palace, witnessing the rise of President Lula in Brazil and traveling through Argentina during the country’s economic crisis. His reflections and reportage on such experiences provide an exciting road trip through pivotal moments in Latin America’s recent history.

Activist and writer Boudin is a former Rhodes Scholar and the translator of Understanding the Bolivarian Revolution, the co-author of The Venezuelan Revolution, and the co-editer of Letters From Young Activists.

In Gringo, Boudin’s writing places the reader in his shoes by peppering his stories with striking details and anecdotes from Chile to Guatemala. On one bus ride in Honduras, he writes, “the driver stopped an hour into a three-hour itinerary so he could visit at his girlfriends’ house for forty-five minutes, leaving those of us on board to sweat in the afternoon heat.”

The book is populated by the people Boudin meets in buses and living rooms across Latin America. He brings these characters to life on the page with descriptions such as this one, of Colombian farmer Enrique Echeverría: “His hands, clearly those of a man who has worked every day of his life, carried a machete, which he kept in a leather scabbard on his belt.”

Boudin contextualizes the journey with reporting and illuminating interviews. In Ecuador, he quotes Magdalena who says, “Many of us had to sell or abandon our land in favor of work in the informal sector or in flower export companies. Our ancestors have been farming the mountains for thousands of years but these days you’ve got to have faith to farm.”

In Colombia, he writes of the thousands of people displaced from paramilitary and military violence. While on a human rights delegation to the country, he tries to put to use advice he heard from Zapatistas in Chiapas years earlier: “If you have come to help us, please go home; if you have come to join us, welcome. Pick up a shovel or a machete and get busy.” In Colombia, he writes, “my digital camera would be more useful than a machete: the solidarity we showed by joining the community and documenting the paramilitary activity were key steps in their strategy to reclaim control of their land.”

As the title of the book suggests, Boudin regularly contemplates his identity as a gringo in a foreign land, at one point writing of the complicated “struggle to build honest, equal relationships with people, not just relationships based on financial support.” But he does establish many friendships on the road, creating a community of comrades, a broad network that spans the hemisphere.

Interspersed throughout the book are the author’s reflections on the fact that when he was just 14 months old his biological parents, members of the radical Weather Underground group, were sent to jail for their involvement in a bank robbery that left three men dead. Boudin’s father, David Gilbert is still in jail while his mother, Kathy Boudin was released in 2003.

The robbery and subsequent imprisonment of his parents is often brought up by Boudin alongside his political and social observations in Latin America. The experiences, friendships and freedom he encounters in his travels are described in contrast to the jail time served by both his parents.

“Part of the point of travel was to appreciate the passage of time,” Boudin writes, “quite the opposite of time spent, for example, in prison where passing time quickly is an imperative, every minute on the road counts and should be dragged out, savored.”

From the politics of bus travel in Central America to 21st century socialism in Venezuela, Boudin’s colorful introduction to some of the most dramatic and hopeful years in Latin American history is itself a journey to savor.

Why I’ll Never Buy a Kindle

First published in Alternet

November 17, 2009

Written by Benjamin Dangl

A green crochet cover envelopes the Kindle of Eileen Messina in Freeport, Maine. She has downloaded a number of popular titles onto her reading device – one of many new handheld digital gadgets now available to read books. New Yorker reporter Nicholson Baker wrote that Messina lamented that books at the library sometimes smelled of cigarette smoke. Baker says, “a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment.”

But a lot of book-readers, myself included, enjoy the smell and palpable history of a book from a library or used bookstore. There is something comforting about the shared experience of reading a physical book many others have read, and will read in the future. I like the story of a used book – a folded page, the markings on the margins, the hints at its past. Sure, sometimes they smell like cigarette smoke, but they can also smell like the places they’ve been, whether it’s a dusty old used bookstore or the tropical funk of Asunción, Paraguay. You can’t share a Kindle book and so history doesn’t cling to it the same way.

One bookstore in London has a display of the items left accidentally in used books that were donated to the store. In the Guardian, Theresa Malone writes that the display includes “a chest x-ray, an air freight invoice and the handwritten guest list to a party, complete with notes for the host’s speech. …about a dozen photo albums containing family holiday snaps, wedding day memories, pictures of pets and more are laid out on a table for customers to browse through.”

These leftovers from another period in a book’s history aren’t something you can ever get with the Kindle. As Malone writes, “The creased spines and turned down pages, those makeshift bookmarks from a bygone age, all signs that the book, which is now yours, has been in the past a real, tangible, treasured possession.”

There is also the story of the actual geographic journey of a book, the travels of something born out of a keyboard that later takes on a life of its own. One reader wrote me to say that a copy of my first book, The Price of Fire, was on the back of the toilet seat when her toddler woke up early one morning raising havoc and ended up knocking the book into the toilet. Once, just after finishing a copy of Ramor Ryan’s book Clandestines in Argentina, my backpack – with the book in it – was stolen in Buenos Aires. Who knows where that book might be right now?

Such stories of books have parallels to the widely circulated news of 30,000 plastic toy ducks that were washed into the Pacific Ocean in 1992 when the container carrying them fell off the cargo ship. The Times Online reported that “Two thirds of them floated south through the tropics, landing months later on the shores of Indonesia, Australia and South America. But 10,000 headed north and by the end of the year were off Alaska and heading back westwards. It took three years for the ducks to circle east to Japan, past the original drop site and then back to Alaska on a current known as the North Pacific Gyre before continuing north towards the Arctic.”

Like one of these plastic ducks, one never knows where a book might end up. There isn’t the same mystery with the Kindle. As Rebecca Solnit writes in her book, Hope in the Dark, “Writing is a model for how indirect effect can be, how delayed, how invisible; no one is more hopeful than a writer, no one is a bigger gambler… You write books. You scatter seeds. Rats might eat them or they may rot…”

With a Kindle on the other hand, you know where it will end up – with the rest of the toxic trash heaps that our newest technical gadgets are eventually destined for. Baker of the New Yorker writes that the Kindle is “made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years.”

However, the Kindle does save trees, and in a country that trashes 83 million tons of paper annually, that’s no small task.

But whatever happened to just going to the library? As Kiera Butler writes at Mother Jones, “The San Francisco library bought 78,445 books in 2008. Let’s assume each of the library’s 2,265,209 visitors borrowed two books.” By doing that “You’ve reduced your reading emissions to 42 pounds of CO2, nearly an eighth of what they would be if you bought all your books new.”

Maybe your local public library has shut down, like so many other cash-strapped libraries across the country. Columnist Katha Pollitt points out, “If the government can bail out the banks that are so deeply implicated in our current troubles … Why can’t it support libraries and schools and publishing by stocking the public bookshelves with inviting new books and hiring staff to keep the doors open?”

Instead of shelling out hundreds of dollars for a Kindle, why not just go to the library for the book you’re looking for. And when you’re there, hand a check for the money you would have spent on the Kindle to the librarian.

With Kindles we lose more than the smell of cigarette smoke on the pages of a library book. As one character in Ray Bradbury’s book Fahrenheit 451 said, “Do you know why books such as this are so important? Because they have quality. And what does the word quality mean? To me it means texture. This book has pores. It has features. This book can go under the microscope. You’d find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion.”

US Establishes Military Bases in Colombia as Honduran Crisis Continues

Written by Benjamin Dangl

Thursday, 05 November 2009

In a quiet ceremony behind closed doors in the Colombian Presidential Palace, US Ambassador William Brownfield sat down with three Colombian ministers to sign a deal allowing for 1,400 US military and private contractors to operate in seven expanded military bases in the country. The date was October 30, just one day after an apparent solution had been reached to allow ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya to return to power. These two developments are central to the mixed messages the Obama administration is sending to Latin America.

On June 28, Zelaya was overthrown in a military coup. He returned to the country on September 21 and has taken refuge in the Brazilian embassy ever since. Though the recent negotiations appeared to offer somewhat of a solution to the crisis that has gripped the country, it is still unclear whether or not the Honduran Congress and coup leaders will actually respect the agreement, and allow Zelaya to return to power.

The US further complicated matters when Tom Shannon, the US Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, recently told CNN that the US will officially recognize the results of the November 29 election whether or not Zelaya is in office. In response, Zelaya sent US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton a letter asking for clarification on the US stance. Such conflicting signals have defined the US response to the situation in Honduras since the coup took place.

The US sent another troubling message to the region when it signed the military bases agreement with Colombia. Most aspects of the deal remain unknown as the Colombian government has not responded to requests from various Latin American presidents for more information and transparency. The leaders are concerned that the expanded US military presence poses a regional security threat and violates Latin American sovereignty.

One of the bases is to be expanded to allow for the use of C-17 planes. “The idea”, the Associated Press reported, “is to make Colombia a regional hub for Pentagon operations… nearly half the continent can be covered by a C-17 [military transport] without refueling”, which “helps achieve the regional engagement strategy”.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose country neighbors Colombia, has been a major critic of the deal from the start. He has asked why C-17 planes, with “warfighting capability” and the capacity to carry 200 paratroopers, would be used at these bases. Chavez pointed out that the plane that kidnapped Zelaya from Honduras stopped at a US air force base in the country before heading to Costa Rica.

“The official signing of the agreement, which allows the United States to deploy seven military bases in the heart of our America… threatens not only Venezuela, but all the peoples in the center and the south of our hemisphere,” Fidel Castro wrote in a recent column. “A country like Cuba is well aware that after the United States imposes its military bases, it leaves only when it desires to do so.”

“Colombia decided to hand over its sovereignty to the United States… Colombia no longer governs its territory,” President Chavez said on a Venezuelan TV program. “Colombia today is no longer a sovereign country… it is a kind of colony.”

The US-funded Plan Colombia in the so-called war on drugs in Colombia has been characterized by terrible human rights violations - violations that are only likely to increase with this military escalation.

“The Colombian regime, which backs death squads and has the continent’s worst human rights record, has received US military support second in scale only to Israel,” political commentator John Pilger pointed out.

While the crisis drags on in Honduras, relations between Washington and Latin America have taken another turn for the worse. As George Withers of the Washington Office on Latin America told the Associated Press, “At a time when we should be pursuing every kind of diplomatic avenue to reduce tensions, this appears to be a military decision that may increase tension.”

Socialist Soccer in the Andes

Originally published in The Guardian Unlimited

Written by Benjamin Dangl

September 19, 2009