Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America: Looking Back at Half a Decade of Political Struggle

Dancing with Dynamite in Latin America: Looking Back at Half a Decade of Political Struggle

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Written by Benjamin Dangl Published: 10 November 2015

This month marks five years since the publication of my book Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America, (AK Press). Thanks to everyone who has read, borrowed, pirated, or stolen it. The dance with dynamite between social movements and states in Latin America that the book followed in 2010 continues today, but in a transformed political and economic landscape.

While the region’s leftist shift has continued with major gains in the fight against poverty, social exclusion, and imperialism, the death of Hugo Chavez has been a critical turning point for Venezuela and the rest of Latin America. The coup against Fernando Lugo in Paraguay continued the onslaught against democracy and peasants’ rights that was well-entrenched even during Lugo’s brief time in office. The divisions, alliances and co-optations in Bolivia between the MAS government and indigenous and social movements have become more complicated than perhaps ever in the country’s history. The fault lines between indigenous movements, governments and multinational corporations that developed around the question of extractive industries have cracked open social conflicts from Quito to Patagonia.

At the same time, the internationalization of movement strategies and struggles connected at the end of the book exploded on the world scene over this time, with the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and the anti-austerity movements across Europe, to name a few.

I came up with the idea for Dancing with Dynamite one night in La Paz while reading John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This quote rings true now as much as it did then, reading it while a new Bolivian constitution was drafted in Sucre, land was being occupied by the MST in Brazil, the worker-run factories hummed along in Argentina, and millions of people across the Americas conspired for a better world:

"The causes lie deep and simply—the causes are a hunger in a stomach, multiplied a million times; a hunger in a single soul, hunger for joy and some security, multiplied a million times; muscles and mind aching to grow, to work, to create, multiplied a million times… The danger is here, for two men are not as lonely and perplexed as one. And from this first 'we' there grows a still more dangerous thing: 'I have a little food' plus 'I have none.' If from this problem the sum is 'we have little food,' the thing is on its way, the movement has direction. Only a little multiplication now, and this land, this tractor are ours." - The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

Argentina Plaza de Mayo group locates founder's grandson

Argentina Plaza de Mayo group locates founder's grandson
6 November 2015


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AFP

Delia Giovanola de Califano (centre) is one of the 12 grandmothers who formed the group in 1977
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Argentine campaign group Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo say they have identified the grandson of one of the group's co-founders.

Argentina's military junta snatched hundreds of babies from their opponents in the 1970s and gave them to sympathisers to bring up as their own.

The grandson of co-founder Delia Giovanola is named Martin.

But the discovery comes too late for his sister, Virginia, who took her own life in 2011.

The Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo was formed to reunite families with their missing children, who had been stolen by the junta.

Martin is the 118th grandchild to be located by the group.

His parents, Jorge Oscar Ogando and Stella Maris Montesano, joined the ranks of Argentina's "disappeared". Their bodies have never been found.

More:
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-34753088

Peru Victims Of Forced Sterilization Registry Is Not 'Political Calculation' Against Opposition, Gov

Peru Victims Of Forced Sterilization Registry Is Not 'Political Calculation' Against Opposition, Government Says

By Michelle Mark @michelleamark m.mark@ibtimes.com on November 09 2015 2:27 PM EST

Following the Peruvian government’s announcement Friday it would create a national registry for the victims of forced sterilization in the 1990s, President Ollanta Humala's administration sought to dispel accusations that the move was made for political gain, TeleSUR English reported. Humala is facing off in the 2016 elections against popular opponent Keiko Fujimori, whose father was president during the era in which the sterilizations took place.

Between 1996 and 2000, an estimated 350,000 people -- mostly impoverished indigenous women living in rural areas -- underwent forced sterilization under a program introduced by then-President Alberto Fujimori, who is now in prison for human rights abuses. Fujimori had argued for the sterilization program as a fix to eliminating poverty through lowering the country’s birthrate.

The Humala administration has said the new registry is meant to provide a legal framework to help implement services such as legal assistance, psychological treatment and holistic health for the victims. Both victims and political opponents in Peru’s Congress have said Humala used this issue in the country’s last election cycle to attack Keiko Fujimori during a presidential debate and then did little to pursue justice for the victims after winning the election.

. . .

Activists have called the forced sterilizations one of Peru’s biggest human rights scandals. Esperanza Huayama, a victim of forced sterilization, told Reuters that government health officials in the 1990s had gone door to door in her farming community, enticing women to come with them to a clinic for free medical treatment, where they were instead anesthetized and sterilized. Huayama was three months pregnant at the time. She said her baby was born dead weeks after the surgery.

http://www.ibtimes.com/peru-victims-forced-sterilization-registry-not-political-calculation-against-2176008

'Narco pardons' burden Garcia as he seeks Peru presidency

'Narco pardons' burden Garcia as he seeks Peru presidency
Associated Press
By FRANKLIN BRICENO
November 5, 2015 11:40 AM

LIMA, Peru (AP) — Alan Garcia granted hundreds of convicted drug traffickers early release the last time he was Peru's president, pursuing a clemency campaign believed unparalleled in the world that he said was giving the deserving a second chance while easing prison overcrowding.

Now the "narco pardons" are haunting Garcia as he seeks to return to the presidency for a third term, with the officials who arranged the releases on trial for allegedly running a get-out-of-jail-for-pay scheme.

Questioned about the commutations two years ago by a special congressional committee, Garcia insisted he carefully weighed each case, often staying up well past midnight to pore over thick files.

"I sought God's counsel in making each and every one of these concessions," he told the committee.

But witnesses testifying before a court at a maximum-security prison in Lima's dusty northern hills tell a different story, one of quick-turnaround commutations for convicts who paid thousands of dollars, dozens of releases sometimes arranged in a single day and a streamlined process that squeezed complicated cases into an eight-line questionnaire.

More:
http://news.yahoo.com/narco-pardons-burden-garcia-seeks-peru-presidency-050054358.html

The Alamo: America’s Shrine to White Supremacy

The Alamo: America’s Shrine to White Supremacy
November 6, 2015
by Lee Ballinger

Phil Collins, the former drummer with Genesis who went on to be one of the biggest pop stars of the 1980s (“In The Air Tonight,” “Invisible Touch”) was in San Antonio on June 26, 2014 for a press conference at the Alamo. Collins announced that he was donating his vast collection of artifacts related to the 1836 Battle of the Alamo to the museum which sits on the Alamo grounds, just up the street from San Antonio’s famed Riverwalk.

Collins, who traces his Texas obsession to recreating the Battle of the Alamo with figurines as a kid in his English backyard, has been visiting the site periodically since 1973. He has written a book, The Alamo and Beyond, which is a coffee-table tome with photos and essays he’s written about each of the two hundred items in the collection. Collins has also written a forward to a book on music about the Alamo.

Collins claims he may have actually been at the Battle of the Alamo 178 years ago. Perhaps it’s that psychic backstory which causes him to speak, ad nauseum, about only the details of the 1836 battle in which Mexican troops annihilated a force of two hundred men of the Republic of Texas army. Yet Collins says he supports a full interpretation of the Alamo’s entire history. So let’s go there.

The Mexican troops who attacked the Alamo are always described in the history books as the aggressors, so the first thing to clarify is that the Alamo was in Mexico. The so-called “Texians” who were in the fort representing the Republic of Texas were part of an attempt by U.S. slave states to expand the scope of slavery westward.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/06/the-alamo-americas-shrine-to-white-supremacy/

Cuba’s Operation Carlota 40 Years Later

November 5, 2015
Cuba’s Operation Carlota 40 Years Later

by Matt Peppe

After 40 years, Republic of Guinea native Alpha Diallo still remembers the emotion he felt as a 20-year-old college student in Cuba when he made a decision that would change his life. The Cuban government had just decided to send troops to Angola to fight the invading South African army, which had crossed the border into Angola several weeks earlier on Oct. 23, 1975. Diallo, who had come from western Africa to Havana on scholarship two years earlier to study agricultural engineering, attended a rally of 800,000 people in the Plaza of the Revolution as Fidel Castro announced the military mission to support the anti-colonial Angolan movement and fight apartheid.

“I followed Fidel’s speech and it was compelling. Among the Guineans, 15 of us decided to give up our studies to go fight,” Diallo recalled recently in a phone interview from his home in Washington D.C. “We were so impressed and we were excited to go.”

Diallo said that as Africans, he and the other students felt a special obligation to help the Cubans fight for the liberation of other African countries. Since the early 1960s, Cuba had provided crucial support to movements throughout Africa seeking to free themselves from colonialism.

In Guinea-Bissau, Cuba had provided military instructors and doctors, enabling the rebels to gain their independence from Portugal two years earlier. After the Portuguese dictatorship fell in 1974 and Portugal prepared to grant Angola independence on Nov. 11, 1975, three local movements fought to take power.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/05/cubas-operation-carlota-40-years-later/

Chilean government acknowledges poet Pablo Neruda might have been killed

Source: Associated Press

Chilean government acknowledges poet Pablo Neruda might have been killed

A panel of experts continues to investigate whether the Nobel-winning poet Pablo Neruda was killed by the Pinochet dictatorship

The Associated Press
November 5, 2015

SANTIAGO, Chile — Chile’s government is acknowledging that Nobel-prize winning poet Pablo Neruda might have been killed after the 1973 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power.

The Interior Ministry released a statement Thursday amid press reports that Neruda might not have died of cancer. The statement acknowledged a ministry document dated March of this year, which was published by the newspaper El Pais in Spain.

“It’s clearly possible and highly probable that a third party” was responsible for Neruda’s death, the document said. However, the ministry cautioned that a panel of experts investigating the highly disputed topic had not reached a conclusion.

Neruda was best known for his love poems. But he was also a leftist politician and diplomat and close friend of Marxist President Salvador Allende, who committed suicide rather than surrender to troops during the Sept. 11, 1973, coup led by Pinochet.

Read more: http://www.macleans.ca/news/world/chilean-government-acknowledges-poet-pablo-neruda-might-have-been-killed/

World's highest glaciers, in Peruvian Andes, may disappear within 40 years

World's highest glaciers, in Peruvian Andes, may disappear within 40 years

Updated 5 November 2015, 16:05 AEDT
By Krista Eleftheriou

It's the world's highest tropical glacial field and scientists predict it will be gone within 40 years.


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Water flows into the glacier lake, Laguna 69, in the Cordillera Blanca, Peru. These
glaciers are disappearing over time. (Credit: ABC licensed)
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In the process, it is likely to deliver water shortages and catastrophic floods to towns in the Peruvian Andes.

More than 2,500 glaciers slice through the mountain peaks of Peru. Around 660 of them lie in the country's highest mountain range, the UNESCO listed Cordillera Blanca.

The United Nations body warns the glacial retreat threaten the livelihoods of 2 million people, living in the valleys below and the desert coastal cities that rely on the glaciers' water.

"In the last 40 years the glaciers have retreated at least 34 per cent," Huaraz based Glaciologist and Civil Engineer Cesar Portocarrero said.

More:
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/2015-11-05/worlds-highest-glaciers-in-peruvian-andes-may-disappear-within-40-years/1511546

In Colombian mountains, natives see in winter, honouring the dead

In Colombian mountains, natives see in winter, honouring the dead
By Florence Panoussian (AFP) 3 hours ago

As millions elsewhere celebrate Halloween in fancy costume dress, for the Misak people of southeastern Colombia the coming of November is a solemn occasion to honour the dead.

Of the scores of indigenous groups in Colombia, the Misak are considered to have best conserved their ancestral traditions, which at the coming of winter means making offerings to their ancestors.

"For us, the year 2015 ended on October 31," said Manuel Julio Tomina, 52, a traditional doctor in this community around the town of Silvia, home to 14,500 of the 20,000 Misaks in Colombia.

"The new year started on November 1 and all the spirits of the dead come to visit us. Here people make offerings around the fireplace and all over the house."

The Misaks live at more than 2,500 metres (8,200 feet) altitude in the Andes.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/news/world/in-colombian-mountains-natives-see-in-winter-honouring-the-dead/article/448331#ixzz3qVpk1U4Q

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Colombia to close popular Caribbean Park for natural protection

Colombia to close popular Caribbean Park for natural protection

English.news.cn 2015-10-29 13:38:19

BOGOTA, Oct. 28 (Xinhua) -- The Colombian authorities decided to temporarily close Tayrona National Nature Park, one of its most popular tourist destinations in the northern Caribbean region, in response to an indigenous community petition to protect nature.

The tourists ban takes effect on Nov. 1 and lasts one month.

The closure came after the indigenous community of Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta asked the authorities to close the park to revitalize the environment of Tayrona, a protected area with a diverse and rare

Tayrona Park, located a few kilometers east of Santa Marta city, covers approximately 30 square kilometers of maritime area in the Caribbean sea and approximately 150 square kilometers of land.

It boasts a variety of climate and geographical features, housing an extensive classification of animal species.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2015-10/29/c_134762348.htm

(Short article, no more at link.)

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Local fauna - Tayrona Natural National Park, Colombia













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For the indigenous peoples living on the steep slopes of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, sustaining the balance of the spiritual and ecological world is their sacred task. They call themselves the Elder Brothers, the guardians of the Earth, and the rest of modern civilization are the Younger Brothers, whose exploitative practices are destroying the mountain’s ecosystem and, by extension, the rest of the planet. The four indigenous groups of this region—the Kogi, Wiwa, Arhuaco and Kankuamo—believe the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is the beating heart of the world: what happens here happens everywhere, and when its rivers run dry, its ice caps melt and its endemic species disappear, so do the rest of the world’s. They maintain their deep commitment to restoring equilibrium to the Earth through daily meditations, ritual practices and mental discipline, and they have continued this vigilance even as the Younger Brothers have encroached into the mountain with logging, mineral extraction, commercial plantations and drug-crop cultivation that placed them at the center of violence between warring factions in Colombia’s protracted civil war. Protecting the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta’s water resources is now their focus, as they protest projects that will dam two mountain rivers and a massive ocean port development that will export natural resources mined in the region while also blocking access to a sacred site by the sea. In 2007, the four tribes issued a joint statement condemning the projects: “From the beginning of these projects we have expressed in many ways our opposition … They negatively affect our way of life, they degrade the environment, and they violate every part of the Constitution that pertains to the fundamental rights of our people.”

The Land and Its People The four existing indigenous tribes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta are the remnants of a sophisticated pre-Hispanic civilization known as the Tayrona. When the first Spaniards set foot in Colombia in the 16th century, they found a civilization that practiced sustainable farming through crop rotation and vertical ecology, built terraced drainage systems that minimized erosion, and produced exceptional gold and pottery work. But the conquistadores drove the tribes high up into the mountain, where they tried to protect their culture through isolation. The Kogi were able to maintain the most traditional culture while the Wiwa and Arhuaco experienced different levels of acculturation. The Kankuamo, who had all but disappeared, are now working to recover their language and culture. Estimates for the total number of native people living in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta range between 35,000 and 51,000. Though the tribes speak different languages, they have nevertheless retained a common spiritual tradition. According to this tradition, when the great Mother created the world, she spun a spindle, and the threads that unspooled crossed to form the four Tayrona peoples and the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta itself. Within the indigenous communities, every action and behavior is informed by what they call the “Law of Origin,” an ecological philosophy that governs their relationship to nature, animals, weather, bodies of water and the cycles of the planets and stars. The spiritual practices and ethical beliefs of the Tayrona revolve around their conception of aluna, which is the belief that all reality is created by thought, and that every object or being has both a physical reality and a spiritual essence, all originating in thought. The tribes’ highly trained ritual priests—the mamas—communicate in the aluna dimension through ritual and meditation. In their communion with the aluna world, the mamas focus on maintaining the ecological and spiritual equilibrium of the mountain. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is a singular ecosystem. This multi-peaked volcanic massif, located just 25 miles inland from Colombia’s northeastern Caribbean coast and rising to a height of nearly 19,000 feet, is the world’s highest coastal mountain. Shaped like a pyramid—each side approximately 90 miles long—the mountain climbs through multiple ecological zones, from the wetlands and mangroves along the coast, through tropical rain forests, deserts and alpine tundra, until finally reaching the snow-capped peaks. Thousands of plant and hundreds of animal species, dozens of which are endemic, have been found here, including 628 bird species—about equal to what has been identified in the United States and Canada combined. The Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta is drained by more than 30 rivers, which makes it an invaluable water source for the 1.5 million people who live in the cities and towns that circle the base of the mountain. It is this rich water resource that is now threatened by the multiple dam and irrigation projects currently under way.

- See more at: http://www.sacredland.org/sierra-nevada-de-santa-marta/trackback/#sthash.CfDmeSQM.dpuf