The Americas

The Ossington Circle Podcast Episode 4 – Students for Justice in Palestine with Nora Barrows-Friedman

I interview Nora Barrows-Friedman, author of In Our Power: U.S. students
organize for justice in Palestine. We discuss the U.S. campus movement
for justice in Palestine, the challenges it faces, and the remarkable
students and advocates that make it up.

The state murder of an activist

By now, the facts are well known to millions, but it is worth going over them again. On July 10, a 28-year old woman, an activist with the Black Lives Matter movement, who had recently moved to Texas for a new job at a university, was being followed too closely by a speeding car on a highway. She changed lanes to get out of the driver’s way, and that should have been the end of the story, a non-event in her life. But the driver, 30-year old Brian Encinia, was a police officer, and he put his flashing lights on and made her pull over.

Three days later she was dead in a jail cell.

I found out about Sandra Bland’s death after I watched the video of her arrest and abuse by Brian Encinia. When I watched it, I thought it was another routine example of police abuse and violence against black women in the US, like the crazed attack on a 14-year old girl in a swimsuit by Eric Casebolt in June (also in Texas).

Instead, it turned out I was watching the beginning of a long, drawn out sequence of torture and murder. Murder is the only word that can describe this, since, even if the extremely implausible story of her suicide turns out to be true, there is no way she would be dead now if she hadn’t been arrested. Not unlike the murder of Eric Garner by a group of police in New York last year, the main killers being Daniel Pantaleo and Justin Damico of the NYPD. Or the murder of Walter Lamer Scott by Michael Thomas Slager, who gunned the man down while he fled. These are just a fraction of the cases that have been highlighted by the Black Lives Matter movement (which numbered Sandra Bland among its activists).

And Black Lives Matter, while gathering the numbers and leveling a systemic critique, can conceivably only focus on a fraction of the hundreds of people killed by law enforcement personnel in the US each year. Killings by US police are far higher than most other Western countries. There are different ways of counting, and different institutions doing the counting. But whether you look at the Guardian’s database, the Killedbypolice.net database, the Fatal Encounters database, or some other, we seem to be living in the midst of an upsurge of murders by police, targeting especially ordinary unarmed black citizens, male or (now) female.

Watching the videos of these murders, several things stand out: the extraordinary cowardice of the police, who attack completely defenceless people from a position of complete safety; the careful attention to covering up that begins immediately after, or even during, the attack; and the steady, methodical escalation of the situation by the police until they are able to attack. For all of these things, the video and transcript of Sandra Bland’s arrest by Brian Encinia, as well as the accompanying coverup operation, is the most extraordinary example so far.

Encinia is in complete control of the interaction at every moment. He pulls her over, she complies. He asks her what is wrong, she tells him she is upset to have been pulled over, and he uses this information to escalate (“are you done?” he asks). He then tells her to put out her cigarette, something she knows she doesn’t have to do, but seems to do anyway. She is accepting the ticket he has written for her, when he escalates again. Before long he has opened the door and commenced the attack, during which at various points he tells her to move, and then tells her not to move.

At each stage, Sandra talks to Encinia as one human being to another, telling him the harm he is doing to her arms, to her ear, to her head, about her medical conditions; and also reminds him of the legal framework in which they are supposed to be operating. Encinia simply proceeds with his assault.

My conclusion from this video is that there was absolutely nothing Sandra could have done to save her life. From the moment Encinia decided to pull her over, he could have de-escalated at any one of twenty or thirty moments. It is easy to imagine how the same dynamic continued at the Waller County Jail, where she was detained for three days, after which the jail authorities produced her body along with a series of impossible photos, edited videorecordings, nonsense about Sandra’s supposed depression, and botched autopsies that are designed to ensure that no one is ever punished for Sandra’s murder. The County Sheriff is running the investigation into her death. The County Sheriff also runs the jail where she died. The discrepancies in the reports and videos that they have put forward to date, with straight faces, are, if taken at face value, a staggering declaration of incompetence. The obvious alternative explanation is that we are watching a coverup unfold.

Despite the presence in the media landscape of people like Harry Houck who will defend any violence that police do, Sandra Bland is an extraordinarily difficult person to present as a physical threat to an armed police officer. The best that Houck could come up to defend her murder with was to say she was “arrogant”. Arrogant while being arrested, then suddenly depressed and suicidal, presumably. What Sandra Bland’s case demonstrates is that black women are targets as black men are, that being non-threatening won’t save you, that knowing the law and asserting your rights won’t save you, that the legal framework that is supposed to govern and constrain police interactions with people, and investigations of these interactions after they become fatal, is viewed by police as optional.

How widely is this view that the law is optional for police shared by the US public? This view seems to be held by the police as a group, as well as most of the US media that defend them. But what do the people think? The police captured in the iconic videos of the Black Lives Matter movement are the objects of well-deserved fear, contempt, and revulsion. But they are also the recipients of widespread unearned solidarity, offered without any conditions, from within their group and from within society. Much of this solidarity is because of racism. Part of it is because of respect for the law and the legitimacy of institutions, which work better for some than for others.

A society that offers widespread unconditional solidarity to police will end up tolerating the intolerable, and it has. The idea that Black Lives Matter is the idea that this unconditional solidarity can be cracked if the facts can be heard. Maybe it could even be replaced by solidarity with the ordinary people who, more than ever after Sandra Bland’s murder, are being told to live in fear that police can kill them with impunity.

First published at TeleSUR english: http://www.telesurtv.net/english/opinion/US-The-State-Murder-of-an-Activist-20150725-0008.html

A tribute to Trayvon, from Delhi

Trayvon Martin

You forgot your Biblical lessons,
Dear boy; God being Light, all
Good things are white;
And Satan being the prince
Of darkness, being born black
Is a hopeless mess.

Against such black vissicitudes
Was a just law found that said
To the white killer, “stand your ground.”

Only some sixty million of your forefathers
Were murdered in the slave trade;
Too many more are still left
To be made dead. Sinners are those
That think racism is bad.

Only when non-white trash gathers
Into a common cause is racism racism;
Zimmerman is merely God’s own prism.
Continue reading “A tribute to Trayvon, from Delhi”

The Zimmerman Verdict and MMA

Misinformation about martial arts seems to have played a role in the Zimmerman verdict. Because of the mass popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), there is an assumption that people know more about martial arts than they actually do.

When the defense asked Zimmerman’s MMA (mixed martial arts) trainer to demonstrate the ‘mount’ position and the ‘ground-and-pound’, the defense’s theory was based on two propositions.

Continue reading “The Zimmerman Verdict and MMA”

Paraguay: Weaving Peoples Resistance Against Corporate Occupation

Hello friends. We at En Camino put this together and it has gathered signatures since the coup. We are hoping to work together to find ways to support FDD in the coming weeks and months. -Justin

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The undersigning organizations, collectives and individuals working towards a coordinated initiative of popular resistance from and with the peoples of Paraguay clearly and unequivocally declare:

Continue reading “Paraguay: Weaving Peoples Resistance Against Corporate Occupation”

Curuguaty and the Paraguay Coup

When the landless peasants of the Carperos Campesino Movement moved on to the 70,000 hectare ranch in Curuguaty registered to Blas Riquelme, they would have known that they were risking their lives. Using the same successful methods as elsewhere in Latin America, perhaps most famously by the Landless Peasants Movement (MST) in Brazil – Curuguaty is close to the Brazilian border – the campesinos would occupy the land, hold it, and negotiate with the government. The methods – summarized in the slogan Occupy, Resist, Produce – were effective, but costly. A Paraguayan advisor to the Human Rights Office, Claudio Baez Samaniego, estimated that 150 peasants had been killed from 1989-2003 in police land evictions (1). Baez suggested that police be better trained in more peaceful methods of eviction. The campesinos might have other suggestions – but regardless, peasants who struggle for land are doing so at tremendous risk. Unarmed, they face highly armed police and private armed forces who use violence to demonstrate the price of resistance.

Paraguay has one of the most unequal distributions of land in Latin America, with 85% of the land in the hands of 2.5% of landowners, and many of these concentrations of land, including Riquelme’s, were acquired during the dictatorship years. Riquelme’s fortune, and much of his lands, were acquired under the 45-year dictatorship (1954-1989) of Alfredo Stroessner, whose regime killed at least 4,000 and disappeared at least 400 people, including horrific and demonstrative atrocities against indigenous people. Riquelme was a member of (and former President of Stroessner’s Colorado Party, owner of several supermarkets to go with his thousands of hectares (2).

Even ill-gotten, the lands may not have been legally Riquelme’s. An editorial by Alcibiades Gonzalez Delvalle in ABC Color, Paraguay’s major media source, argues that the 2,000 hectares in question never belonged to Riquleme, that the transfer of land from the dictatorship to the private landowner was never formalized – so that Riquelme’s call to the government to evict the peasants and “follow the law” was itself illegal. With this history and as an exemplar of the inequalities in land, this particular piece of land had been an objective of the landless peasant movement since 2004 (3).

But that is what happened. The big landowner asked the government to follow the law and evict the peasants. The government sent the elite, Colombian counterinsurgency-trained police, among whom was the brother of President Lugo’s security chief, in on June 15 (2). Then, things went horribly wrong.

Well-organized peasants, especially in numbers, can often successfully resist evictions. They do so by preventing the police from using their weapons, by dictating the struggle won’t be based on who has the bigger weapons. What they do not do is shoot back, much less shoot first. But in this case, as the police moved to begin their evictions, six of them were killed in an ambush by precision shots from automatic weapons in three round bursts, above the eyebrow, between the eyes, in the mouth, under the jaw, in the neck, and in the back (4). These are not the type of weapons, or training, that landless peasants suddenly show up with. When peasant movements have taken up arms as they have in Latin America in the past, their initial operations are usually attacks on police stations or paramilitaries, not precision assassinations of police at otherwise unarmed occupations. The shooters were not from the landless peasant movement, though the peasants paid the price for what the attackers did.

The police, predictably, rampaged and killed the campesinos, at least 11, with reports of more, as well as the other predictable abuses – detentions, torture, and arrests (5). The Army airlifted 150 soldiers into the area and took over the operation, at President Lugo’s order. Also predictably, the crime scene was quickly irreversibly tainted and evidence destroyed, so that exactly what occurred will never be known for certain (6).

Paraguay’s media, and politicians, speculated that the peasant movement had been infiltrated by a Paraguayan guerrilla group, the Paraguayan People’s Army (EPP) (7), but there was no evidence for these speculations, and nor, again, did the strategy make sense. Guerrilla groups that have tried to infiltrate unarmed peasant movements usually do so in ways that enabled them to take credit and win recruits from actions. The outcomes here were a predictable massacre of peasants and, ultimately, the fall of a president. To find out who might be behind it, it is worth looking for who benefited from it.

President Lugo’s Cabinet Chief, Miguel Lopez Perito, identified it as a conspiracy against Lugo’s presidency on the by June 17th (8). So did activists from Lugo’s Tekojoja Party, including Anibal Carrillo Iramain, who went on the radio on June 21:

“What happened there was not an accidental skirmish or an accidental confrontation, but a perfectly mounted, highly professional operation whose objective was precisely to establish a situation of tension and demand for security, whose second chapter would be the political trial” (of President Lugo) (9).

The political trial followed. The Congress and Senate, including many from the old dictator’s Colorado party, as well as Liberals from the opposition and defectors from President Lugo’s party, came up with a formula: Lugo may not have killed anybody, but he facilitated the deaths, so he had to go (10). And he did go. His Vice President, Federico Franco from the Liberal Party, took over to finish out Lugo’s term before 2013 elections. As Todd Gordon and Jeff Webber pointed out in the Bullet, attempts to impeach Lugo started in 2009 – the Paraguayan establishment and political opposition kept at it until they found (or created) an event big enough to justify a coup (11).

The US Embassy in Paraguay was certainly aware of this. On March 28, 2009, they sent a cable home that described the opposition’s plan as follows:

“Their goal: Capitalize on any Lugo mis-steps to break the political deadlock in Congress, impeach Lugo and assure their own political supremacy.”

The US Ambassador describes the opposition’s ‘dream scenario’ in 2009 as more or less what came to pass in 2012:

[The] “dream scenario involves legally impeaching Lugo, even if on spurious grounds. (With a two-thirds vote, the Chamber of Deputies may bring impeachment proceedings against the president. Like in the United States, the Senate tries impeachments, again requiring two-thirds vote to convict). The presidential baton would thus, in this scenario, pass to Vice President Federico Franco, who would be constitutionally required to call vice-presidential elections within 90 days.” (12)

Ten years ago in April 2002, when Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was overthrown in a short-lived coup, the evidence suggests that the opposition had snipers kill some of their own, and some pro-Chavez demonstrators, in order to provide the pretext for the coup. All of the tactics used in Paraguay have precedents – in Venezuela in 2002, in Haiti in 2004, and in Honduras in 2009. Those attacked in these coups represent a wide political spectrum. Chavez is different from Haiti’s Aristide, and both of these are quite different from Honduras’s Zelaya and Paraguay’s Lugo. Aristide went to some lengths, but Zelaya and Lugo went to great lengths to prove they were willing to compromise with their elites. Why did they get overthrown anyway?

Lugo was elected by a population tired of the Colorado Party. He was elected in anticipation of land reform and of breathing space for the movements that had been devastated by the dictatorship and the neoliberal transitional decades that followed. The people hope for land, dignity, democracy. The elite vision is one of concentrated land, policed by violence, ringed by US bases scarred with dams or mines producing raw materials for manufacture elsewhere (probably China) and consumption elsewhere again (probably North America). Even if Lugo didn’t fulfill them, the coup was an attack on the dreams themselves, in a very concrete way: a lesson to the population about what will happen if you’re hoping even for a light reformer.

Now Paraguay is expected to look to Honduras for what will happen next: the forces of democracy (already organized in Paraguay as the Frente para la Defensa de Democracia – or FDD) will be put down (and these deaths won’t be recorded as major incidents like Curuguaty). Elections will be organized, a wide range of subtle and overt cheating will occur, the right people will find themselves in office, they will facilitate the appropriate plunder of the country, and the only reminder of what occurred will be some hazy linking of Lugo to a massacre at Curaguaty.

Notes

(1) ABC Color. 17 de junio de 2012. Unos 150 campesinos fueron asesinados en desalojos, segun datos del asesor de Fiscalia. http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/politica/unos-150-campesinos-fueron-asesinados-en-desalojos-segun-datos-del-asesor-de-fiscalia-415047.html.

(2) Idilio Mendez Grimaldi. June 22, 2012. ?Por que derrocaron a Lugo? http://www.atilioboron.com.ar/2012/06/por-que-derrocaron-lugo.html.

(3) Alcibiades Gonzalez Delvalle. June 24, 2012. ?Hasta cuando? http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/opinion/hasta-cuando-418088.html. ABC Color. 16 de junio de 2012. Larga historia de invasiones. http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/politica/larga-historia-de-invasiones-414763.html

(4) ABC Color. 15 de junio de 2012. Precision de tiradores expertos. http://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/disparos-precisos-de-tiradores-expertos-414533.html. Later on, ABC Color reported that shotguns and grenades were found at the scene – but information from the wounds, early on, is probably more reliable than information about what was found (or planted) at the scene, later on, after a convenient political narrative is spun and facts are needed to pad it. ABC Color. 15 de junio de 2012. Asesinos usaron escopetas. http://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/policias-fueron-abatidos-con-perdigones-414662.html; ABC Color. 16 de junio de 2012. Escopetas, cazabobos y machetes. http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/politica/escopetas–cazabobos-y-machetes-414760.html

(5) Dario Pignotti. June 21, 2012. Paraguay: There are More Dead Comrades. Upside Down World, translation from Pagina/12, Argentina. http://upsidedownworld.org/main/paraguay-archives-44/3699-paraguay-there-are-more-dead-comrades. ABC Color. 18 de junio de 2012. Denuncian tortura a detenidos en Curuguaty. http://www.abc.com.py/abc-radio/denuncian-tortura-a-detenidos-en-curuguaty-415535.html

(6) ABC Color. 19 de junio de 2012. Un arma desaparece de la escena del crimen. http://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/la-escena-del-crimen-fue-manoseada-asquerosamente-415972.html

(7) ABC Color. 16 de junio de 2012. Lugo ordena salida de militares, pero su gobierno no vincula ataque con EPP. http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/politica/lugo-ordena-salida-de-militares-pero-su-gobierno-no-vincula-ataque-con-epp-414672.html

(8) ABC Color. 17 de junio de 2012. Matanza de policias fue on complot, denuncian. http://www.abc.com.py/edicion-impresa/politica/matanza-de-policias-fue-un-complot-denuncian-415063.html

(9) ABC Color. 21 de junio de 2012. Masacre en Curuguaty fue montada, dicen. http://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/masacre-en-curuguaty-fue-montada-para-llegar-al-juicio-politico-dicen-416871.html

(10) ABC Color, 21 de junio de 2012. Tuma dice que Lugo facilito matanza en Curuguaty. http://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/tuma-dice-que-lugo-facilito-matanza-en-curuguaty-417029.html. ABC Color, 18 de junio de 2012. Culpan a Lugo por la violencia. http://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/culpan-a-lugo-por-la-violencia-415555.html.

(11) Todd Gordon and Jeffrey R. Webber. June 26, 2012. Paraguay’s Parliamentary Coup and Ottawa’s Imperial Response. The Bullet, Socialist Project no. 657. http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/657.php

(12) US Embassy Cable March 28, 2009. 09ASUNCION189. Published by Wikileaks. http://www.wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/03/09ASUNCION189.html#. The author of the cable, probably Ambassador Liliana Ayalde, has an amusing style, including an alliterative title “PARAGUAYAN POLS PLOT PARLIAMENTARY PUTSCH”. She describes the post-coup President, Franco, as “known for being an old-school Liberal party politician with an oversized ego and a difficult personality.”

Azkintuwe and the Mapuche Struggle

An interview with Pedro Cayuqueo

Justin Podur and Manuel Rozental
October 20, 2010

Continue reading “Azkintuwe and the Mapuche Struggle”

Manuel Rozental on Haiti

Haiti: The Mobilization of Aid, Public Discourses and Political Action by Manuel Rozental from Justin Podur on Vimeo.

On February 11, my friend and mentor Manuel Rozental did a talk on Haiti at York University, where he gave some of the regional perspective that I got from him and presented in some of my talks.