To cut down a rebellion

Colombian riot police surround thousands of indigenous and labor activists in Cauca, in southwest Colombia. The number of protestors remains around 10,000, and has been that high for a week, according to on-site reports. Most of the demonstrators are indigenous Nasa people from the region, struggling to stay on their land. Others are sugar cane-workers fighting for their rights. The riot police have attacked them repeatedly, injuring dozens with tear gas and killing several with live ammunition. Beyond the police killings and injuries there are those carried out by the paramilitaries, who supposedly don’t exist any more, but have nonetheless, in the past few weeks, murdered a women’s rights activist and her whole family, several indigenous leaders, several indigenous people who were not involved in any protest activities at all, and several protesters in live fire attacks.

The international environment is favorable to the Colombian state’s strategy of making its enemies invisible before physically attacking them. The US electoral spectacle is a black hole for attention, mainstream and alternative. The US Democrats have a slightly different position from the Republicans on free trade with Colombia, and the question of murdered union leaders even made it into a presidential debate (McCain ignored it, while Obama actually suggested that Colombia’s murdering union leaders was a bad thing). The policies of privatization, social service cuts, militarization, and the pillage of Colombia’s resources by multinationals have been bipartisan for decades. But so has the dispensability of individual Colombian leaders and contractors of dirty work. Perhaps Colombia’s President, Alvaro Uribe Velez, and his team, are worried that their heads could roll if there is a change of administration in Washington. Perhaps they are trying to accelerate their own program to destroy local opposition before this occurs. That may explain the particular brutality of the past few weeks.

The causes of the protest run deeper, however. The history of this part of Colombia mirrors much of Latin America. In the 1950s, hundreds of thousands of people were thrown off their lands through massacre, violence, and civil war (an event called “La Violencia”). Many of these people were then forced to come back to lands that had been theirs, and work as insecure laborers on massive sugar plantations owned by a wealthy elite. Some groups, like the indigenous Nasa of Northern Cauca, over decades of struggle, succeeded in winning back their lands and recovering much of their culture and traditional economy. Many others, including thousands of Afro-Colombian cane workers, struggled hard just to keep themselves and their families alive.

Today, the economics of sugar plantations are absurdly exploitative. In a full 14-hour day of work, a cane cutter can harvest some six tons of cane, one of which they get paid for. That ton gets turned into 200 kg of refined sugar that sells for about $120. The cutter gets, before deductions, about $2.50. After deductions, it’s about $1.50.

The plan is for such plantations to expand massively. And, indeed, much of the land of the 3.5-4 million internally displaced people in Colombia (the majority of whom are Afro-Colombian and a huge disproportion of whom are indigenous) has been taken over by sugar plantation owners. The plan is not just for refined sugar, but also for biofuels. Long after Venezuela’s oil runs out, North Americans will still be able to pour the products of Colombia’s sugar plantations into their car engines.

The enemies of this plan are the indigenous and peasants who want to stay on their land and use it to grow food and a decent agricultural economy, and the labourers who want to be able to survive on their wages. Both are treated the same way: to false accusations, to arrested and murdered leaders, to tear gas, and to bullets. The cane workers have been on strike since September 15 and their demands are heart-breakingly minimalist. They want to have an actual contract, rather than the piecework system they have now; the right to unionize; and a decent salary and working conditions.

On October 19, the indigenous protesters held a press conference to outline their position. “We don’t have a government in Colombia”, said Nasa spokesperson Feliciano Valencia. The indigenous authorities announced their own agenda: “No to the economic model and the FTA´s with the US, Canada and Europe, removal of legislation that impoverishes peoples, destroys and denies rights and freedoms, delivers the wealth of the country to corporate interests and has not gone through consultation with those affected. No more war and terror as the main Government policy. Respect and application of international and national agreements and establishment of the conditions that will allow the people to construct a new, possible and necessary country.” Next Tuesday (Oct 21), they announced, they will march from the site where they are gathered, La Maria Piendamo, to Cali. They will be joined by other movements and organizations. They will accept a dialogue with the government but the military must cease fire and remove itself from the territories.

Colombia’s movements continue to shoulder more than their fair burden against one of the most brutal regimes in the hemisphere. The regime can’t be allowed to drown out their story.

To read more about and to financially support the cane workers: http://www.labournet.net/world/0810/colomb3.html

The statement of the indigenous movement:
http://mamaradio.blogspot.com/2008/10/official-proposal-of-indigenous-and.html

Justin Podur is an activist with Pueblos en Camino (www.en-camino.org) and a Toronto-based writer. His blog is www.killingtrain.com.

Can the Taliban Win? Pervez Hoodbhoy in Toronto (back on Oct 6)

On October 6 I was lucky enough to finally meet Pervez Hoodbhoy, the Pakistani activist and physicist, who I have long admired and corresponded with a little. He was going to be in Ottawa and on short notice people at the University of Toronto’s Munk Centre managed to organize a talk for him. The talk was called “Can the Taliban Win?” As usual with these blogs, I will summarize what he said, and follow with my reactions.

Continue reading “Can the Taliban Win? Pervez Hoodbhoy in Toronto (back on Oct 6)”

The financial economy and the real economy: Notes on the economic crisis part 1


“This extraordinary capacity to finance not on past wealth but on the present value of future anticipated cash flows is at the core of America’s dynamic approach to wealth creation” – Edelstein, R., and Paul, J.M. Europe needs a new financial paradigm. Wall Street Journal Europe June 12-13, 1998. Quoted in The Fisherman and the Rhinoceros.

Continue reading “The financial economy and the real economy: Notes on the economic crisis part 1”

Media Democracy Day Thurs Oct 23, Toronto

For those in Toronto, please come to the Media Democracy Day conference and my workshop. Callout below.

MEDIA DEMOCRACY DAY WORKSHOP
33 ST GEORGE ST
TORONTO, ON
2:30-3:30

Organized by OPIRG U of T

Left punditry: doing and presenting political analysis.

This workshop is for the rogue opinionated radical, or (better), the activist with an organization working on some aspect of communication.

Continue reading “Media Democracy Day Thurs Oct 23, Toronto”

Myths for Profit

I have written a bit about Canadian foreign policy over the past few years. The big piece I wrote and built on since, I called “Canada for anti-imperialists”. That was about four years ago now. Since then, I learned two things.

1) Films can reach audiences that written articles can’t, and
2) I have absolutely no skill, ability, aptitude, or enjoyment in filmmaking

Luckily for me, others do!

Continue reading “Myths for Profit”

Canadian election taboos – and possibilities

The 2008 Canadian election has some of the features of the past few elections. The majority of the population faces the quandary of how to defeat a reactionary party that just might have the largest plurality of support. Will they get a majority or just a minority? The second place party has slight differences with the ruling party but has a record of lies, destructive neoliberal economics, and destructive foreign policy. Should they be taught a lesson or have they learned it? Can they be punished without the electorate punishing itself? The electoral system is increasingly out of step with the diversity of popular opinion. And some very important questions about immigrant rights, indigenous rights, indigenous territory, corporations, and the country’s relationship to the rest of the world, are off the table. But for all that, it is still an interesting situation. In last week’s leaders’ debates, three of the five parties, who got equal time, had left-of-center views. Of course, in North America the center moves steadily to the right and is defined by it, but the debate was still refreshing. Environmentalism is popular, and the presence of the Green Party forces the NDP to run more openly to the left, since the centrist environmentalist niche is already filled by the Greens. Fighting with the Greens for this niche has also had a civilizing influence on the Liberals, who are talking about climate change seriously.

There are still too many taboo topics. Taxation, for example, was denounced by all parties in the debate, who fall over themselves and each other to insist their plans won’t increase anyone’s taxes. This is public miseducation. Like budget deficits, taxes have their role, and for politicians to eschew them is to tie the society’s hands before situations that require flexible economic responses. Making people pay more to ride public transit, or adding user fees for health care services or pharmaceuticals, or cutting funding for the arts, causes suffering just as surely as raising taxes does – it just causes suffering for different people. Letting the transportation, energy, and water infrastructure rot doesn’t make a budget deficit, but it does make an infrastructure deficit, and society ultimately will pay for either kind. This is especially true in a time when the Harper/Bush/McCain people’s economic policies have proven so spectacularly and widely disastrous and ideas of public economic management need to be quickly and sensibly resurrected and implemented.

But these simple points cannot be made in any political campaign because for a party to say they would use deficit spending or increase taxes (as opposed to “shifting” taxes) would be harmful to them politically. But allowing the society’s economic discourse to be dominated by ideological distortion also does political harm, especially to progressive forces (and parties that would use those forces to come to power).

Another example is ‘terrorism’. You would never know from politicians or the media that everything that is a crime under new ‘anti-terror’ legislation (killing people with bombs or guns, kidnapping people, destroying infrastructure) was a crime before the ‘anti-terror’ legislation. The legislation is a political tool for increasing state and police powers, and is being used in ugly ways against a group of young people in Toronto as these elections are unfolding. In his recent sentence against one of the Toronto 18, the judge argued that it did not matter that the 20-year old had committed no crime, and it didn’t matter that he may not have known. The NYT correspondent (and yes, for sensible coverage of this Canadian topic the NYT was better than the mainstream Canadian press) Ian Austen described the trial this way:

“Evidence presented in court made it clear that, at best, the man was a minor character in the group… There was no evidence offered directly linking the defendant to the bomb plot or plans to storm Parliament. Instead, most of the case focused on his attendance at two camps that the police described as terrorist training sessions but that prosecution witnesses characterized as recreational or religious retreats. Both were videotaped by a paid police informant who was part of the group and who testified that he choreographed some of the scenes.” (NYT Sept 25/08)

The informant, in question, said this about the young man found guilty: ‘“I don’t believe he was a terrorist,”… Mr. Shaikh said he did not believe that the defendant was aware of the group’s violent plans.’ (NYT Sept 26/08)

As for Judge Sproat, who rendered the verdict, he argued that “planning and working toward ultimate goals that appear unattainable or even unrealistic does not militate against a finding that this was a terrorist group… engaging in activities such as paint-balling, physical exercise and rafting is by no means inconsistent with the existence of a terrorist group” (NYT Sept 26/08)

Sproat’s verdict fits with well the Rumsfeld doctrine on the same topic: “The absence of evidence does not indicate the evidence of absence.” And it has the same shocking implications for Canada’s legal system. Or would, if anyone were paying the slightest attention. But here, too, it seems politicians have nothing to gain by suggesting that we ought not allow the state to use entrapped suburban youths to terrify us into surrendering rights to due process.

Other non-debated examples that politicians stay away from? The continuing occupation of recently hurricane-devastated Haiti, Canadian support for all of Israel’s moves against Palestinians, the neoliberal “Free Trade Agreements” with the US and other Latin American countries like Colombia, the use of force and prison terms against indigenous communities defending land and life, and so on.

And yet there is the occasional glimmer of a genuine discussion. When an Afghan-Canadian argued that Canada should remain with NATO in occupying that country, Jack Layton argued that Canada should not have been there in the first place and should withdraw as soon as possible. When Harper tried to offer the usual deceptions about reducing ‘emissions intensity’ as opposed to carbon emissions, Giles Duceppe used his time to explain exactly why this was a deception: the example he gave was – you would reduce emissions by 10% per barrel, but then you would produce 5,000 barrels instead of 1,000. These are glimpses of what one could actually hope for from a political debate: people not letting sham arguments pass unexposed.

The most intriguing possibility has more to do with the voting pattern than with the outcome. As much as I like what they are doing at voteforenvironment.ca in spite of critiques like this one, I don’t like the final outcome sought by voteforenvironment.ca (75 Con, 123 Lib, 52 NDP, 1 Green, 55 Bloc, 2 IND). I would prefer it to be even closer between the Liberals and the Conservatives. The latest national poll has Con 33%, Lib 26%, NDP 19%, Green 12%, and Bloc 10%. It is certainly true that it is worth putting thought and effort into averting a conservative majority. But a split of 35-25-20-20 in Anglo-Canada and the Bloc taking most of Quebec, for example, that resulted in a Conservative minority (or even a majority) would create strong pressure for change in the electoral system: in such a system the Liberals would have much more to gain from insisting on such a change than trying to keep a two-party system and hope they can win in it. Proportional representation would create other possibilities for progressive forces during elections, and reasons for politicians to have to pay attention.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer.

Naomi Klein in Toronto

Last night I saw Naomi Klein speak to a packed house at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. She captured a lot of what I’ve been feeling these days and managed to explain to me why I have been unable to write anything for the past two weeks. I’ve felt there was so much going on that all I could do was some kind of roundup of all the things that would treat them all superficially, or delve into one or two and not mention some huge things that were going on, neither of which appealed to me. Not that silence in these times is better. But Naomi helped me solve my problem with a strategy of her own: try to explain the situation and get help with what to do from people you respect.

It was strange, she said, to be on a platform speaking to a room full of people trying to analyze events that seem to be going too quickly to make sense of. But she proceeded to do as good a job, it seems to me, as anyone could, of offering something that could help people make sense of things.

I would summarize her talk as follows. She started from the basic premise of her book, the Shock Doctrine: that elites use the shock of natural disasters or military violence to impose economic policies that redistribute wealth from the people to the wealthy. She also used a quote from Friedman from the book, that the key was what ideas were “lying around” when a crisis hits. Friedman and the Chicago School and their counterparts around the world ensured that their privization/deregulation/monetarism were lying everywhere, and also helped to motivate and justify the violence that imposed the ideas.

What did that have to do with this moment? Several things. First, the financial collapse of the US banks and mortgage institutions were a direct outcome of these ideas. Second, that the solution to such a crash, the last time there was one of such magnitude (and with similar causes, in the 1920s), was the entry of the government into the economy in a massive way – the regulation, nationalization, taxation, and public investment of the New Deal in the US. At that time, though, there was more grassroots organizing locally (though, like the organizations that exist today, those were demonized and made invisible as much as possible at the time and in historical accounts) and there was more international rivalry (from the Soviet Union and 3rd world nationalism). Today US elites see themselves as victors enjoying the spoils of the world and, like a neglectful partner in a romantic relationship, see no ideological or institutional competition to give them an incentive to behave better.

And yet, Naomi said, this was ours (progressives’) moment to lose. We ought not to defeat ourselves by believing their propaganda about us, that our project failed because our ideas failed. That is not true. And they are proving it for us – by socializing the debt that the banks incurred, they are showing what progressives know and always have said – that government always plays the major role, the only question is whether that role will be on behalf of the wealthy or whether there will be some component of looking after the public. We should not be deceived by their arguments of inevitability, especially now that they have demonstrated their incompetence and their inability to handle the situation. Nor should we be deceived by their declarations of our weakness. We, she concluded, are much stronger than we think.

There were more details, including some very interesting ones, but that was the basic argument she presented. What followed was almost as good as the talk itself though, as Naomi switched from being a speaker to being a host for some of the best activist organizations in the city to talk about a huge number of things that are happening now. It is going to take a lot of people to try to make sense of these times, and the structure of the event was consistent with that message. The activists that spoke were also excellent and at their best. People always ask me what to do, Naomi said, so I am going to get some help answering that question.

The Ontario Coalition Against Poverty talked about an ongoing campaign for public housing in Toronto. Public housing used to be one way to house people affordably. The alternative, Naomi pointed out, was the open ended speculative mortgage bonanza that culminated in first the foreclosure crisis last year and the collapse of banks this year. Any US crisis will eventually be a Canadian crisis, since Canada’s elites have made the country so dependent on the US. And any US economic doctrines become Canadian doctrines – at least the elite ones. In Toronto the City’s strategy is to become the biggest slumlord in the city, refusing to do the necessary repairs and keeping the people in the public housing system in squalor, so that the argument can eventually be made that the buildings should be condemned and replaced with condos, privatized. OCAP is part of a campaign to fight this through witholding rent and pooling it for repairs themselves. It is a simple and brilliant strategy that will work if enough people take it up. Another fight is against the invisibilization of homeless people on the streets – once invisible, they lose any protection from the state’s depredations. There’s a street takeover on Saturday October 4th. If you’re in Toronto, be there. This was a moment of extraordinary opportunities and dangers, but the biggest mistake would be to accept the inevitability of capitalism.

More fighting words came from the Tyendinaga support committee, who gave us the latest on Shawn Brant’s case and on a successful fight against a $2 million police station in a community that doesn’t have drinkable water.

Two speakers from No One is Illegal talked the fight against deportations, the exploitation of insecure labor, and the ongoing theft of land and resources from indigenous people, the deeper elements of the whole system. They both talked about what solidarity means – fighting along with the oppressed.

Someone from the Stop the War Coalition pointed out that in all the talk of present and future fiscal crisis that is going to preclude needed investment in social and environmental areas, no one is questioning the need for trillions (in the US) and hundreds of billions (in Canada) of dollars to go to the military. Also, that if Canadian mobilization helped stop Canada’s elites from joining the war in Iraq, it could do the same to end Canada’s participation in the occupation of Afghanistan (and future wars).

The Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid talked about how the Palestinians are the experimental subjects for innovation of the Shock Doctrine – surveillance, control, torture, imprisonment, destruction of the basis of survival. CAIA argued for the campaign of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli regime and Canada’s support for it, until Israel complies with international law.

Discussion then turned to the Canadian election that will take place on October 14. An activist from a very clever website, voteforenvironment.ca pointed out that on October 14, Canadians would have their choice of 4 parties with progressive environmental policies and one dinosaur (the Tories). The Tories do not have a majority of the public by any means but they could win a majority because of our electoral system. Unless voters subvert the electoral system by voting strategically (which is NOT the same as voting liberal!). The site gives riding-by-riding information on who the favourites are and who the best candidate to defeat the tories is in each riding. It is non-partisan, other than being anti-Tory, which agrees very well with my position on this election. Please take a look at their site and pass it along. Canadians are some of the most wired people in the world per capita, which means a campaign like this could work. (Another motivation to oust the Tories, related to the high per-capita internet use of Canadians, is the Tories’ appalling digital copyright bills, the subject of some very interesting campaigning: see Russell McCormand’s blog, for a place to start). Activists from a new group called the Department of Culture also announced their campaign and upcoming events (that will be appealing since they’re artists) to try to stop the Harper people.

The whole event was really special for two reasons. One, because it tried to respond to a great deal of what was going on very seriously and sincerely, and managed to present so many campaigns and ideas and still seem politically coherent (at least to me). Two, because the relationship between the activist groups and event organizers and the speaker was just the right one: one of dialogue and mutual support.

The best line of the night was when she was talking about the job of progressives being to move the center. Let the liberals in power make the compromises – movements should push them. And in times like these, the more pushing, the better the eventual compromise. If, for example, they said the green economy couldn’t be afforded after socializing the public debt, then the way forward is clearly to nationalize the oil companies as well as the banks, since oil companies were still very profitable. In short, Naomi advised, ‘get out there and say some crazy stuff’.

I agree.

PS: This is not an unbiased article, nearly all the groups and people I mentioned are friends, groups I belong to, people I admire, etc.

PPS: I am going to try to write something about the economic crisis in the coming days. People have been asking and I have been researching…

Bolivia’s elites seek a media coup

Bolivia’s popular movements are attempting to use democracy and a legitimate government to advance an agenda of sovereignty, greater equality, and development. Their opponents, led by several governors of the wealthier provinces in a part of the country called the “media luna”, are trying to use violence and sabotage to stop that agenda by provoking a civil war and chaos. The challenge to Bolivia’s government and its president Evo Morales is to stop the violence without allowing the provocation to succeed. In meeting that challenge, Morales has the support of most of the Latin American governments. His opponents have the support of the United States government.

Both sides are using tested models. Bolivia’s path has similarities with that of Venezuela. After long debates about whether the electoral path to change was the right one, an electoral strategy was mapped out with some of the social movements supportive, others skeptical. Having won elections, the new government faced difficulties because much of the state apparatus, including regional governments, remained in the hands of the old elite and status quo, while the economy remained controlled by foreign powers and local elites. Trying to re-structure the government while keeping the country running, dealing with foreign interference, and then use legislation and a constitutional process to attempt deeper reforms, is a major challenge. But the government’s attempts at reform were strengthened and propelled by popular support and, more importantly, popular organization. Meanwhile the fact that Washington’s attention was focused on the Middle East provided some breathing space.

The opposition is also using tested models. In Venezuela in 2002 and in Haiti in 2004, US-backed elite movements developed methods for enacting a coup against an elected regime. Western media would support the elite and present a distorted picture of the elected government and its leader as a “strongman” or “dictator”. These media reports could be translated and re-broadcast locally to present a popular government as if it were internationally isolated. The US Embassy and other personnel could contribute to both the media campaign and to the financial, political, and military organization of the opposition. In the final stages, military or paramilitary forces would be necessary. They would create some spectacular instances of violence: perhaps by attacking unarmed opposition protestors whose deaths could be blamed on the government; alternatively, they could attack government supporters who confront the opposition in counter-demonstrations.

The latter might lead to armed action by government supporters in self-defense or in reprisal, or to repression by military forces still loyal to the government. In either case, further pretexts are provided for the government’s claimed perfidy and violence, which could then lead to calls from the US that the government step down in a predictable press conference at the US Embassy.

At this point in Bolivia, the international media campaign against the government is on in full force, the US has helped to organize the opposition, and since September 10 the requisite massacres have been produced, by the opposition itself, its victims the government’s supporters. If the regional governments support the Bolivian government and the armed forces remain loyal, as they are likely to, the Bolivian government will survive this crisis. But lives have been lost senselessly in this attempt to stop Bolivians from claiming their rights.

Although the path to the current crisis has been longer than a few weeks (for some background see our previous “Bolivia on the Brink”, ZNet March/08), the trigger for the current violence was the announcement on August 28, 2008 by Evo Morales of a date for a referendum on the new constitution. It is to be held on December 7, 2008, and it will mean a re-founding of the country: land reform, nationalization of natural resources, and institutional changes that will make it much more difficult for the elite to block popular measures.

The elite´s main strategic goal is to avoid the constitutional referendum by pressuring the government to postpone the constitutional referendum. This would cost Evo his popular support and destroy any capacity or momentum for popular reform. The Morales government is extremely popular, and the elite knows it. Their strategy has been, rather than to claim that they are representative of the country as a whole, that they are seeking autonomy for their own regions, which are controlled through old networks of patronage (and, more recently, violence as well). In May 2008 they held their own autonomy plebiscites, organized by the five provincial governments under their control, with no international oversight and no legal basis. Morales’s government dismissed these as illegitimate and when a recall referendum was held on August 16, 2008 (this time with international observers and a legal basis), Morales won with 67% of the vote.

Two weeks later on August 28, Morales issued a presidential decree setting the December 7 date for the constitutional referendum. On September 2, the electoral court announced its opposition to the referendum on technical grounds (the court claimed the referendum couldn’t be announced by decree but had to be passed by Congress, including by the opposition-controlled Senate). The opposition governors of the five provinces demanded the referendum be called off. Opposition demonstrators began to block roads. They seized an airport in Cobija on September 5 and blocked the highway between Santa Cruz (an elite stronghold) and the capital, La Paz, followed by roads linking Bolivia to Brazil. They attempted to take over government offices and clashed with Bolivian armed forces – who had been ordered, and followed orders, to not respond to provocation.

In the first week, these opposition protests failed. They generated neither the desired reprisals nor hoped-for of popular support against the government, though they had caused economic damage. Opposition leaders, like wealthy governor Ruben Costas who met with US ambassador Philip Goldberg, must have been concerned about their lack of success. So in the second week of protests, the opposition escalated and moved down the path of sabotage and murder. The road blocks had resulted in energy shortages in the opposition-controlled areas, but the seizure of a gas plant in Villamontes on September 8 and an attack on a pipeline to Brazil on September 10 made problems worse. On September 11, “clashes” in Cobija, Pando, killed about 11 people. The government began to use tear gas and pellets against protestors. Morales called for continued restraint, but warned that “patience has limits”.

On September 12, a paramilitary attack on a pro-government demonstration, just outside Cobija, killed 30 people, in what Bolivian government officials called a massacre. One of the survivors, Antonio Moreno, told the Associated Press that the peasant demonstrators were unarmed. Armed men fired on them from trucks with machine guns. Moreno’s account: “They insulted us, they shot at us, they were armed, others had sticks. We retreated 800 meters but someone said we had to face them. There was a fight, we disarmed some of them but we couldn’t take their weapons away.” The government blamed the governor of Pando, opposition leader Leopoldo Fernandez, for the violence and claimed paramilitary assassins hired by the opposition pulled the triggers. The opposition replied by claiming the peasants attacked first.

The victims of these killings were popular and indigenous movements and organizations, supporters of the government, in the opposition-controlled areas. These organizations helped bring out the popular vote for Evo in the recall referendum and have been targeted for revenge by the elite. Among the attacks in Pando province were the land reform institute, human rights NGOs supporting peasants, and the local indigenous confederation. Among the victims of the Pando massacre was Bernadino Racua, a well-known indigenous leader.

On September 13 and 14 Evo’s government declared a state of emergency in Pando. It used the military to take back the airport and the government offices that had been taken by the opposition. Orders for the arrest of Fernandez and others were issued. Patience had reached its limits, both with opposition violence and with US interference: the US ambassador was declared persona non grata and told to leave, denying the Embassy the chance to hold the usual press conference demanding negotiations, concessions, or a resignation. Chavez followed by expelling the US ambassador to Venezuela, claiming another coup plot against him had been exposed, and Honduras refused to credential their incoming US Ambassador.

The US responded in kind, expelling the Venezuelan and Bolivian ambassadors, threatening “grave consequences”, and announcing sanctions against Venezuelan ministers on the usual drug war grounds (dispelling these drug war accusations requires another article and can’t be done here). Economic and political consequences will run in both directions if the economic relationships between the US and Latin America are harmed. Evo had just visited the Middle East, including Iran, contrary to US attempts at diplomatically isolating that country, and Venezuela just announced joint military exercises with Russia in November. Ecuador’s Rafael Correa announced concerns of separatist movements in the Bolivian mold taking action in Ecuador’s Guayaquil province.

Within Bolivia Evo has acted to try to deny the opposition a strategic victory and prevent the conflict from derailing the popular agenda. On September 9, in the middle of the crisis, he shuffled out some of the ministers he’d been forced to accept out of compromise with the elite and replaced them with people who were ready to move popular economic policies. He opened a dialogue with the opposition but insisted that the referendum would go forward on December 7. The opposition offered to lift the roadblocks on September 14. The government approved this step but said it was completely inadequate to restore order. After orchestrating the deaths of dozens of people, the opposition ought not to be allowed to simply order a temporary tactical retreat. They have the right to due process in criminal prosecutions. They do not, after orchestrating murder and massacre, have the right to demand concessions from a legitimate government.

Latin American leaders, including those of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and others, are meeting on September 15 to seek a resolution to Bolivia’s conflict. Virtually all, including even US ally Colombia, have announced support for Morales’s government and its popular mandate, and that they will refuse to accept separatism.

The movements that brought Evo to power will not go quietly, as the opposition should know. Without the capacity for a national coup, the opposition lacks the popular support to even sow “ungovernability” in their own provinces for very long. Their desperate need is to use the media to amplify their limited actions as larger than they are, to generate external political pressure to force Evo to make concessions and defeat the popular movement for them. As a result, the success of Bolivia’s popular processes depends in part on whether the false stories about the government, the past few weeks, and the days to come, are believed.

Justin Podur is a Toronto-based writer. His blog is www.killingtrain.com.