by CHELLIS GLENDINNING
A season has passed since I
have checked in with you. My lack of communing is in part because I have been
writing. I finished my first novel, called Objects,
and am now working with a translator to submit a Spanish rendition to Bolivian
publisher Plural Editores. It´s a madcap tale of an antique store in Cochabamba
that sells artifacts garnered from revolutions and social movements.
I’m also writing editorials
for Los Tiempos, a job
that comes with a Friday almuerzo attended by a fine assemblage of
writers, thinkers, a painter, the newspaper editor, a yoga teacher, etc. Then, on
a trip south to the frontera with Argentina, I had the privilege to
meet the editor of an anarchist magazine called La Letra Libre.
On that same trip I came
upon a duo of books by the English Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012). I had known of Hobsbawn through his work connecting the
development of certain technologies with the success of empire, and now I am
devouring Revolucionariosand Bandidos — taken together, a mirroring between
rebellious folk who I’ve long felt share motive and bravado.
Meanwhile, Surreal Bolivia
continues to test rationality. The height of southern-hemisphere winter saw a
month-long uprising by doctors, and if you think you are ready to witness
kindly men and women in white coats, with stethoscopes around their necks, breaking
the Hippocratic Oath to hurl rocks at the police, then you are ready for the altiplano. Two weeks later,
the police themselves demonstrated that, what with all the bloqueos, huelgas, and marchas by other sectors of society, they had
not been inattentive to absorbing the finer points of technique. Wearing ski
masks and brandishing their guns, they took to the streets, rampaged around in
armed vehicles, hurled intelligence computers into bonfires, and burned down
their own stations.
All the while, the memory from 2003 when military and police
battled it out put the populace – and the Evo Morales government — on edge,
while I was focused on the curious detail that the unpoliced city had become
inordinately orderly and safe.
A real eye-opener was Independence Day. I bought a seat in the
first row along the Prado and sat through three hours of the parade – which
seemed less a people´s celebration of country-love and more a descendant of
those displays for Stalin in Red Square. Grandstands. Flags. Brass bands. Baton
twirlers. High black boots. Goose-stepping. Uniforms and hardware galore. A few
tanks. A swipe by a fighter plane. And on and on.
The mission of wrapping my
mind around this facet of the human experience is a fracaso, although I try. I
do. I have no trouble attaining the aspiration to don military-inspired threads
and have been known to drive an olive-colored Jeep. But, to truly understand, I
direct myselfinside the
urge. Thanks to Ernest Becker´s work of the 1960´s, I appreciate that meaning lies at the heart of human behavior,
so at least I can grok that someone may feel something that I do not.
Meanwhile, all these
goings-on are interwoven with festive theater pieces boasting dancers in
neon-satin costumes resembling wedding cakes; indígenas acting out the Tinku battle in which
whole communities claw at their neighbors until blood flows; pet dogs in little
top-hats-sombreros-tutus-French-sailor-shirts-ponchos-etc.; the daily
juxtaposition of narco-Hummers with ancianas begging for centavos; etc.
Yet, truly, I tell of such
spectacles only as preface. The real surrealism resides with the
government. Over in La Paz, President Morales and his Movimiento al Socialismo
crew keep themselves busy unfolding their vision of Marxist revolution.
Hobsbawn helped me here. I confess that, although I was enmeshed in 1960s-style
Berkeley Marxism, I received the hypothesis only via osmosis, not through the
serious study that others undertook. And, with apologies, I am more the
daughter of Lewis Mumford than of Marx: I ended up a
Break-Down-the-Empire-Bioregional-Luddite-Eco-Feminist-Anarchist-Peacenik-Indigenous-Rights
freedom fighter/intellectual with an affinity for Chicano culture.
What Evo et al. are up to is
to dictate (a word I do not use lightly) the changes by wielding
an all-seeing, all-potent State – with vicepresidenteAlvaro
Garcia Linera´s projections that in a hundred years, it will fall away and true
communalism will be achieved.
The wielding ain’t pretty.
After September 2011´s
violent SWAT attack on peaceful indígenaswalking
in flip-flops for three months to protect their cultures and sovereign nature
reserve from industrial highway development, the marchers arrived in La Paz to
the cheers of the largest gathering of humanity in Bolivian history. Just the
same, it appears that the Morales government has paid off separate indigenous
communities to attend what could amount to a trumped-up forum to approve
development. He himself proclaims that, no matter what, the industrial corridor
goes through and has even stooped to call the indígenas “savages.” After a second three-month
protest was mounted, the police gassed and fire-hosed the marchers to keep them
out of the public plaza in front of the government´s palace. Now the tribes
have retreated to their lands where they are crafting fresh bows and arrows —
and are forbidding the government to cross into their territories. Meanwhile, proclaiming to
be the avant garde for the rights of Madre Tierra, the
State has amassed its newly-formed Regimiento Militar y Escuela Ecológica to
penetrate said territories. Fearing another violent attack, on 30 August, the
Confederación de Pueblos Indígenas del Oriente Boliviano asked the United
Nations to intervene to protect their human rights.
(The government also gassed, fire-hosed, and beat the disabled
when they arrived at the palace after a 100-day, country-wide wheelchair
“march” to request upping their welfare to… $35 a month.)
As far as freedom of the
press goes, that which the media has predicted would happen is indeed
happening. Hidden in the otherwise laudable 2010 Ley Contra el Racismo y toda forma de Discriminación, mechanisms were set up for closing down TV/radio stations and
newspapers not to the administration´s political liking, and in August 2012 three
outlets – the news agency ANF, Página
Siete, and El Diario — were called to court for what the
government has judged “difusión e incitación al racismo” in reporting
a talk by Morales. The head of the Asamblea Permanente de Derechos Humanos has
called the move “fatal” for freedom of information/ expression, and the
Asociación Nacional de Periodistas of Bolivia is demanding the matter be
settled according to the earlier Ley de Imprenta, which would have the media
itself evaluate reported infringements, rather than undergo a government
court´s process that could lead to closure. On 29 August masses of periodistas attempted to mount a protest in the
public square in front of the palace — needless to say, meeting up with police
shields and batons.
Too, the government
pronounced friend Claudio Ferrufino´s novel Diario
Secreto “racist” and placed
it on the banned-book list (along with some of the nation´s classics, including
socialist hero Marcelo Quiroga Santa Cruz´s Los
Deshabitados). The book is bawdy, but hardly racist — and it won the
national Premio de Novela Alfaguara in 2011. In the news, Ferrufino then became
the butt of a campaign to bar his editorials from the nation´s op ed pages; his
essays openly criticize the government.
In closing, I am driven to
resurrect a phrase from 1940´s filmmaker Preston Sturges´ Sullivan´s Travels to describe this earthly ride we
share: “Cockeyed Caravan.” On a planet in deep trouble (as if weapons of mass
destruction, constant wars, and eco-destruction were not enough), the lack of
official concern for what Hannah Arendt called “the emergency of liberty” poses
a surreal contrast to our struggles for justice and, for those who accept or
herald it, the epitome of Erich Fromm´s wisdom: “That millions of people share
the same pathology does not make those people sane.” To be sure, everyone is
suffering now; no one is immune. So here I am, ending this letter from Bolivia
with our enduring theme: Cariño Is in Need of Cariño Today.
De CounterPunch, Estados Unidos/WEEKEND EDITION AUG 31-SEP 02, 2012
Foto: Ekeko
Chellis Glendinning is the author of five books,
including When Technology Wounds, Off the Map: An Expedition Deep into
Empire and the Global Economyand Chiva: A Village Takes on the Global
Heroin Trade. She may be contacted via www.chellisglendinning.org.
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