Harry Targ : Global Challenges to the International Order

Women protest in Cairo during Arab Spring. Image from Organizing Upgrade.

The empire in disarray:
Global challenges to the international order

Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 10, 2013

A whole generation of activists has “grown up” conversant with the central place of empire in human history. Children of the Cold War and the “Sixties” generation realized that the United States was the latest of a multiplicity of imperial powers which sought to dominate and control human beings, physical space, natural resources, and human labor power.

We learned from the Marxist tradition, radical historians, scholar/activists with historical roots in Africa, and revolutionaries from the Philippines and Vietnam to Southern Africa, to Latin America. But we often concluded that imperialism was hegemonic; that is it was all powerful, beyond challenge.

A “theory of imperialism” for the 21st century should include four interconnected variables that explain empire building as well as responses to it.

First, as an original motivation for empire, economic interests are primary. The most recent imperial power, the United States, needed to secure customers for its products, outlets for manufacturing investment opportunities, an open door for financial speculation, and vital natural resources such as oil.

Second, the pursuit of military control parallels and supports the pursuit of economic domination. The United States, beginning in the 1890s, built a two-ocean navy to become a Pacific power, as well as institutionalizing its control of the Western Hemisphere. It crushed revolutionary ferment in the Philippines during the Spanish, Cuban, American War and began a program of military intervention in Central American and the Caribbean. The “Asian pivot” of the 21st century and continued opposition to the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions reflect the 100-year extension of the convergence of economics and militarism in U.S. foreign policy.

Third, as imperial nations flex their muscles on the world stage they need to rationalize exploitation and military brutality to convince others and their own citizens of the humanistic goals they wish to achieve. In short, ideology matters. In the U.S. case, “manifest destiny” and the “city on the hill,” that is the dogma that the United States has a special mission as a beacon of hope for the world, have been embedded in the dominant national narrative of the country for 150 years.

However, what has often been missing from the left-wing theoretical calculus is an understanding of resistance. Latin American and African dependency theorists and “bottom-up” historians have argued for a long time that resistance must be part of the understanding of any theory of imperialism. In fact, the imperial system is directly related to the level of resistance the imperial power encounters.

Resistance generates more attempts at economic hegemony, political subversion, the application of military power, and patterns of “humanitarian interventionism” and diplomatic techniques, called “soft power,” to defuse it. But as recent events sugge, resistance of various kinds is spreading throughout global society.

The impetus for adding resistance to any understanding of imperialism has many sources including Howard Zinn’s seminal history of popular movements in the United States, The People’s History of the United States. Zinn argued convincingly that in each period of American history ruling classes were challenged, shaped, weakened, and in a few cases defeated because of movements of indigenous people, workers, women, people of color, middle class progressives, and others who stood up to challenge the status quo.

More recently, Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations, compiled a narrative of post-World War II international relations that privileged the resistance from the Global South. World history was as much shaped by anti-colonial movements, the construction of the non-aligned movement, conferences and programs supporting liberation struggles and women’s rights, as it was by big power contestation. The Prashad book was subtitled A People’s History of the Third World.

The 21st century has witnessed a variety of forms of resistance to global hegemony and the perpetuation of neoliberal globalization all across the face of the globe. First, various forms of systemic resistance have emerged. These often emphasize the reconfiguration of nation-states and their relationships that have long been ignored.

The two largest economies in the world, China and India, have experienced economic growth rates well in excess of the industrial capitalist countries. China has developed a global export and investment program in Latin America and Africa that exceeds that of the United States and Europe.

In addition, the rising economic powers have begun a process of global institution building to rework the international economic institutions and rules of decision-making on the world stage. On March 26-27, 2013, the BRICS met in Durban, South Africa. While critical of BRICS shortcomings Patrick Bond, Senior Professor of Development Studies and Director of the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, in a collection of readings on the subject, introduces BRICS with an emphasis on its potential:

In Durban, five heads of state meet to assure the rest of Africa that their countries’ corporations are better investors in infrastructure, mining, oil and agriculture than the traditional European and U.S. multinationals. The Brazil-Russia-India-China-SA summit also includes 16 heads of state from Africa, including notorious tyrants. A new "BRICS bank" will probably be launched. There will be more talk about monetary alternatives to the U.S. dollar.

On the Latin American continent, most residents of the region are mourning the death of Hugo Chavez, the leader of the Bolivarian Revolution. Under Chavez’s leadership, inspiration, and support from oil revenues, Venezuela launched the latest round of state resistance to the colossus of the north, the United States.

Along with the world’s third largest trade bloc MERCOSUR (Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Venezuela and associate memberships including Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru), Latin Americans have participated in the construction of financial institutions and economic assistance programs to challenge the traditional hegemony of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the World Trade Organization.

The Bolivarian Revolution also has stimulated political change based on various degrees of grassroots democratization, the construction of workers’ cooperatives, and a shift from neoliberal economic policy to economic populism. With a growing web of participants, Bolivia, Ecuador, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, and, of course, Cuba, the tragic loss of Chavez will not mean the end to the Bolivarian Revolution. It might lead to its deepening.

But the story of 21st century resistance is not just about countries, alliances, new economic institutions that mimic the old. Grassroots social movements have been spreading like wildfire all across the face of the globe. The story can begin in many places and at various times: the new social movements of the 1980s; the Zapatistas of the 1990s; the anti-globalization/anti-IMF campaigns going back to the 1960s and continuing off and on until the new century; or repeated mass mobilizations against a Free Trade Agreement for the Americas.

Since 2011, the world has been inspired by Arab Spring, workers’ mobilizations all across the industrial heartland of the United States, student strikes in Quebec, the state of California, and in Santiago, Chile. Beginning in 2001 mass organizations from around the world began to assemble in Porto Alegre, Brazil, billing their meeting of some 10,000 strong, the World Social Forum.

They did not wish to create a common political program. They wished to launch a global social movement where ideas could be shared, issues and demands from the base of societies could be raised, and in general the neoliberal global agenda reinforced at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland could be challenged.

The World Social Forum has been meeting annually ever since in Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the United States. Most recently, the last week in March, 2013, 50,000 people from 5,000 organizations in 127 countries from five continents met in Tunis, the site of the protest that sparked Arab Spring two years ago. Planners wanted to bring mass movements from the Middle East and North Africa into the collective narrative of this global mobilization.

Medea Benjamin, founder of Code Pink, reported that a Tunisian student, when asked whether the Social Forum movement should continue, answered in the affirmative. The student paid homage to the Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, who committed suicide and launched Arab Spring. He declared that “for all those who have died struggling for justice, we must continue to learn from each other how to build a world that does not respond to the greed of dictators, bankers or corporations, but to the needs of simple people like Mohamed Bouazizi.”

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University and is a member of the National Executive Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He lives in West Lafayette, Indiana, and blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : 'We Are Many' Offers Thoughtful Analysis of Occupy Movement

From occupation to liberation:
A review of 'We Are Many'

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / December 11, 2012

This aesthetically pleasing volume has the best overall take to date on the meaning of Occupy, its shortcomings and strengths, and its potential future.

[We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation, edited by Kate Khatib, Margaret Killjoy, and Mike McGuire; Afterword by David Graeber (2012: AK Press); Paperback; 355 pp; $21.]

Despite a myriad of obituaries for the movement that began in Manhattan in September 2011, the people of Occupy refuse to let it die.

There are hundreds involved in the Occupy Sandy effort in the New York City region following the devastation of Tropical Storm Sandy. Individuals and groups connected to Occupy Wall Street have organized relief efforts that are feeding and caring for thousands of people left without power, work, and homes.

Those being helped are primarily the working poor and folks on assistance. They are also those traditional relief efforts tend to ignore, precisely because of their income status and, in the USA, also perhaps because of their skin tone or ethnic origin.

The vastness of the Occupy Sandy effort is testament to the Occupy movement's most obvious strength: its ability to organize rapidly and from the ground up.

Since the advent of Occupy and the demise of its encampments, there have been millions of words written about the movement. From Fox News to the Revolutionary Communist Party's journal Revolution; from Le Monde to the Jerusalem Post; and numerous journals, websites, blogs and television networks, Occupy Wall Street and the movement it spawned provoked a storm of commentary.

Some of it was sensationalist and some of it perhaps overly academic. It was occasionally overly laudatory and often overly critical. Overall, however, the press coverage did something that one could argue no left-leaning movement since the 1960s and 1970s had done. It changed the nature of the national conversation.

Like the black liberation and antiwar movement of those decades long past changed the way mainstream America thought about the treatment of African Americans and the nature of its foreign policy, Occupy changed the way mainstream America thought about its economic system. Or, maybe it just vocalized thoughts people had held but did not know how to vocalize in a way that would draw some attention.

A year later there have been a number of column inches written about Occupy and its meaning. The articles written in the mainstream press tend to acknowledge Occupy's influence in the national conversation. At the same time, these articles tend to diminish its long term role. Perhaps because it is too early to tell. Perhaps because they hope it doesn't have one.

Occupy was the greatest manifestation of anti-authoritarian organizing in the United States in recent history. It proved that spontaneity can work. The taking of property and occupying it is a radical act in itself and obviously one the powers that be find threatening.

The involvement of the houseless was and is important. Their presence and involvement not only made the gross shortcomings of monopoly capitalism real, they also provided food and a reaffirmation of value to those on the streets and an experience at self organizing for all. Yet, it suffered from some of the same ills present in the larger society: racism, sexis, and questions around violence and leadership.

Occupy was/is not a movement that began with highly defined politics. This was its strength and its weakness. Many different philosophies set up camp under its banner. Anarchists, socialists, libertarians, and liberals. Even the occasional tea partier and Democrat.

Yet, despite this multitude of philosophies that came to share the Occupy camps, the one that was its impetus remains a generally defined type of left anarchism. Somewhat situationist like the poster artists of Paris in May 1968 while also derivative of the squatters' movement of the 1970s and 1980s in Europe, Occupy also drew from the anarchism of the Yippies, the counterculture of the 1960s, and the punk culture that came later. Therefore, it would seem that the best analysis of Occupy would come from folks that had similar roots.

Guess what? The best analysis of Occupy does come from such folks. Titled We Are Many: Reflections on Movement Strategy from Occupation to Liberation and published by AK Press, this aesthetically pleasing volume has the best overall take to date on the meaning of Occupy, its shortcomings and strengths, and its potential future.

Never shortchanging the arguments within the movement, the writers collected in We Are Many take on the questions of racism, sexism, the Black Bloc, and the cops, and they do so in an intelligent and lively manner. No other group of writers has done so well in exploring the Occupy movement from within its ranks. In fact, no other group of writers has done so well in exploring the Occupy movement, period.

Unlike earlier books about Occupy, most of which were published either during the life of the encampments or immediately after, We Are Many has the perspective a little time often provides. Away from the intensity of battles with police and the day-to-day reality of camping in the middle of some urban space, this book presents the reader with thoughtful essays designed to raise questions about strategy and politics that might have been pushed aside in the aforementioned day-to-day reality.

Earlier writings about Occupy were often chronicles of organizing; sometimes those chronicles were objective attempts to describe the daily life of the writer and those around them; other times they were impressionistic attempts to do the same thing.

We Are Many has its share of these essays, yet even those indicate a deeper reflection and understanding of Occupy's historical meaning and the potential it unleashed for the future of oppositional and extra-parliamentary movements, especially in the United States.

Writers who appear in this volume include some names fairly well known in anti-authoritarian and left circles: Cindy Milstein, Vijay Prashad, Frances Fox Piven, Andy Cornell, David Graeber, George Cicciariello-Maher, and the Crimethinc Collective, to name just a few. This list is a small representation of the more than 50 writers and artists collected here.

AK Press has done a great service by publishing them together in this volume. Like so many of the publications released by this collective, not only is this book filled with good, thoughtful writing and great art, it is attractively presented. These writers take a hard look at manifestations of racism and sexism in the movement; they discuss the nature of violence and its role in popular movements; and they discuss these and other questions from a perspective that represents the grassroots democratic and anti-capitalist philosophy that motivated the movement.

We do not know what will happen next with the movement awakened by that first presence in lower Manhattan back in the autumn of 2011. In Europe, general strikes and daily protests continue to occur as neoliberal capitalism takes its ransom from governments across the continent. In the Middle East and Central Asia, wars continue to flare and military occupations continue to be challenged.

In North America, the corporate and financial elites continue to ravish the economy and politicians conspire to destroy the remaining social welfare and retirement systems previous generations fought hard to build. WalMart workers are organizing unions and Quebec students fought against university privatization moves and won.

It is not the end of the battle, but the beginning. Onward.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Chris Hedges : Heartland Resistance to the Pipeline

Treesitters in Winnsboro, Texas. Photo from the Tar Sands Blockade.
Resistance in the heartland:
The Great Tar Sands Blockade

Ranchers, farmers, and enraged citizens, often after seeing their land seized by eminent domain and their water supplies placed under mortal threat, have united with Occupiers and activists to oppose the building of the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

By Chris Hedges / Truthdig / October 17, 2012

Also see " Texas landowners take a rare stand against Big Oil," an AP story at Salon.com, "Keystone XL pipeline opponents turn to civil disobedience" at The Washington Post, and this video from Democracy Now!

The next great battle of the Occupy movement may not take place in city parks and plazas, where the security and surveillance state is blocking protesters from setting up urban encampments. Instead it could arise in the nation’s heartland, where some ranchers, farmers, and enraged citizens, often after seeing their land seized by eminent domain and their water supplies placed under mortal threat, have united with Occupiers and activists to oppose the building of the Keystone XL tar sand pipeline.

They have formed an unusual coalition called Tar Sands Blockade (TSB). Centers of resistance being set up in Texas and Oklahoma and on tribal lands along the proposed route of this six-state, 1,700-mile proposed pipeline are fast becoming flashpoints in the war of attrition we have begun against the corporate state. Join them.

The XL pipeline, which would cost $7 billion and whose southern portion is under construction and slated for completion next year, is the most potent symbol of the dying order. If completed, it will pump 1.1 million barrels a day of unrefined tar sand fluid from tar sand mine fields in Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast.

Tar sand oil is not conventional crude oil. It is a synthetic slurry that, because tar sand oil is solid in its natural state, must be laced with a deadly brew of toxic chemicals and gas condensates to get it to flow. Tar sands are boiled and diluted with these chemicals before being blasted down a pipeline at high pressure. Water sources would be instantly contaminated if there was a rupture.

The pipeline would cross nearly 2,000 U.S. waterways, including the Ogallala Aquifer, source of one-third of the United States’ farmland irrigation water. And it is not a matter of if, but when, it would spill. TransCanada’s Keystone I pipeline, built in 2010, leaked 12 times in its first 12 months of operation. Because the extraction process emits such a large quantity of greenhouse gases, the pipeline has been called the fuse to the largest carbon bomb on the planet.

The climate scientist James Hansen warns that successful completion of the pipeline, along with the exploitation of Canadian tar sands it would facilitate, would mean “game over for the climate.”

Keystone XL is part of the final phase of extreme exploitation by the corporate state. The corporations intend to squeeze the last vestiges of profit from an ecosystem careening toward collapse. Most of the oil that can be reached through drilling from traditional rigs is depleted. The fossil fuel industry has, in response, developed new technologies to go after dirtier, less efficient forms of energy.

These technologies bring with them a dramatically heightened cost to ecosystems. They accelerate the warming of the planet. And they contaminate vital water sources. Deep-water Arctic drilling, tar sand extraction, hydraulic fracturing (or hydro-fracking) and drilling horizontally, given the cost of extraction and effects on the environment, are a form of ecological suicide.

Appealing to the corporate state, or trusting the leaders of either party to halt the assault after the election, is futile. We must immediately obstruct this pipeline or accept our surrender to forces that, in the name of profit, intend to cash in on the death throes of the planet.

Nine protesters, surviving on canned food and bottled water, have been carrying out a tree-sit for more than two weeks to block the path of the pipeline near Winnsboro, Texas. Other Occupiers have chained themselves to logging equipment, locked themselves in trucks carrying pipe to construction sites and hung banners at equipment staging areas.

Doug Grant, a former Exxon employee, was arrested outside Winnsboro when he bound himself to clear-cutting machinery. Shannon Bebe and Benjamin Franklin, after handcuffing themselves to equipment being used to cut down trees, were tasered, pepper-sprayed, and physically assaulted by local police, reportedly at the request of TransCanada officials.

East Texas great-grandmother and farmer, Eleanor Fairchild, was arrested Oct. 4 while blocking TransCanada bulldozers on her property. Image from Tar Sands Blockade / Facebook.
The actress Daryl Hannah, along with a 78-year-old East Texas great-grandmother and farmer, Eleanor Fairchild, was arrested Oct. 4 while blocking TransCanada bulldozers on Fairchild’s property. The Fairchild farm, like other properties seized by TransCanada, was taken under Texas eminent domain laws on behalf of a foreign corporation.

At the same time, private security companies employed by TransCanada, along with local law enforcement, have been aggressively detaining and restricting reporters, including a New York Times reporter and photographer, who are attempting to cover the protests. Most of the journalists have been on private property with the permission of the landowners.

I reached climate activist Tom Weis nearly 1,000 miles from the blockade, in the presidential battleground state of Colorado, by phone Friday. Weis is pedaling up and down the Front Range, hand-delivering copies of an open letter -- signed by citizens, some of whom, like Daryl Hannah, have been arrested trying to block the XL pipeline -- to Obama and Romney campaign offices. He has been joined by indigenous leaders, including Vice President of Oglala Lakota Nation Tom Poor Bear, and in Denver by members of the Occupy Denver community.

Weis last fall rode his bright-yellow “rocket trike” -- a recumbent tricycle wrapped in a lightweight aerodynamic shell -- 2,150 miles along the proposed Keystone XL pipeline route. He was accompanied by Ron Seifert, now a spokesperson for the Tar Sands Blockade. Weis’ “Keystone XL Tour of Resistance” started at the U.S.-Canada border in Montana and ended 10 weeks later at the Texas Gulf Coast. He recently produced a 15-minute video in which he interviewed farmers, ranchers, and indigenous leaders who live in the path of the project.

“Keystone XL is being built as an export pipeline for Canada to sell its dirty oil to foreign markets,” he said. “This is not about energy security; it’s about securing TransCanada’s profits.”

Weis cited a report commissioned by Cornell University that concluded that the jobs estimates put forward by TransCanada were unsubstantiated and that the project could actually destroy more jobs than it created.

Barack Obama delayed, until after the election, a decision on permitting the northern leg of the pipeline after a series of civil disobedience actions led by Bill McKibben’s 350.org in front of the White House a year ago, as well as fierce opposition from ranchers in states such as Nebraska. The president, by announcing the delay, put an end to the widespread protests.

Obama, however, flew to Cushing, Okla., in March to call for the southern leg of the pipeline to be fast-tracked. Standing in a pipeline yard, he said, “I’m directing my administration to cut through the red tape, break through the bureaucratic hurdles, and make this project a priority, to go ahead and get it done.”

Obama’s rival for the presidency, Mitt Romney, was no less effusive in his support for Keystone XL, saying to a Pittsburgh audience in May: “If I’m president, we’ll build it if I have to build it myself.”

Grassroots organizing along the proposed pipeline has grown, especially as the project began to be put in place.

If completed, the 485-mile southern leg, from Cushing to Nederland, Texas, would slice through major waterways including the Neches, Red, Angelina, and Sabine rivers as well as the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, which provides drinking water for some 10 million Texans. The southern section of the pipeline is now the focus of the Tar Sands Blockade.

The invasive extraction of tar sands and shale deposits, as well as deep-sea drilling in the Arctic, Alaska, the Eastern Seaboard, and the Gulf of Mexico, has been sold to the U.S. public as a route to energy independence, a way to create millions of new jobs, and a boost to the sagging economy, but this is another corporate lie.

The process of extracting shale oil through hydraulic fracking, for example, requires millions of gallons of chemically treated water that leaves behind poisoned aquifers and huge impoundment ponds of toxic waste. The process of extracting oil shale, or kerogen, requires it to be melted, meaning that tremendous amounts of energy are required for a marginal return. The process of tar sand extraction requires vast open pit mining operations or pumping underground that melts the oil with steam jets.

Tar sand extraction also releases significantly more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional oil drilling, meaning an acceleration of global warming. Drilling in the Arctic, with its severe weather, costs as much as half a billion dollars per well.

Tar sands protesters block TransCanada truck on August 29, 2012, in Livingston, Texas. Image from In These Times.
These processes are part of a desperate effort by corporations to make profits before a final systems collapse. Droughts are already sweeping the Midwest. The battle between farmers and fossil fuel corporations for diminishing water sources has begun. Yet our ruling elite refuses to face the stark reality of climate change. They ignore the imperative to find other ways of structuring our economies and our relationship to the environment. They myopically serve a doomed system. And, if left unstopped, the cost for all of us will be catastrophic.

Weis, a former congressional staffer, expects the last section of the pipeline to be authorized by the president once the election is over.

“It is critical that people understand that completion of the southern leg of Keystone XL -- which President Obama and Gov. Romney both fully support -- would give TransCanada a direct line from Alberta’s landlocked tar sands mine fields to refineries in Texas for export overseas,” Weis explained. “By tapping into Keystone I, which has already been built, the southern leg of Keystone XL would open the floodgates to tar sands exploitation in Canada. At a time when the climate is already dangerously destabilizing before our eyes, I can’t believe we’re even having this conversation.”

He described Obama’s and Romney’s “failure to stand up to this corporate bully” as a “failure to defend America.”

“It is unconscionable to put the interests of a transnational corporation before the health, safety, and economic well-being of the American people,” he said.

Weis sees the struggle to halt the Keystone XL pipeline as a symbolic crossroads for the country and the planet. One path leads, he said, toward decay. The other toward renewal.

There comes a time when we must say to the ruling elite: ‘No more,’ ” he said. “There comes a time when we must make a stand for the future of our children, and for all life on Earth. That time is here. That time is now.”

[Chris Hedges, a columnist for Truthdig, spent nearly two decades as a foreign correspondent in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans. He has reported from more than 50 countries and has worked for The Christian Science Monitor, National Public Radio, The Dallas Morning News, and The New York Times, for which he was a foreign correspondent for 15 years.]

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Social Forum Movement : 'Another World is Possible'

Mural from 2009 Kentucky Social Forum, promoting U.S. Social Forum, June 22-26, 2010, in Detroit.
Resistance to 'globalization':
The Social Forum movement

At the dawn of the new century, a new tradition, inspired by the hundreds of years of resistance, was launched... This disparate assembly shared one idea: 'Another World is Possible.'

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / April 26, 2010

The history of resistance

Just as globalization today has its roots in five hundred years of trade and investment and in exploitation and capital accumulation, the global justice movements of our day also have their roots in the patterns of resistance since the beginning of capitalism.

In a recent article ("Long Before Seattle: Historical Resistance to Economic Globalization") Zahara Heckscher points out that: "In virtually every society the Europeans invaded, people rose up to protest the cruelty of slavery, theft of land, and plunder of resources." While many of the protests were local, provoked by singular transgressions, and were inwardly oriented (from destroying crops to committing suicide to fleeing), many were national in their mobilization or even international.

Heckscher provides examples of resistance movements against globalization that occurred well before “the Battle of Seattle” in 1999. For example, the Tupac Amaru II uprising in Peru (1780-1781) was a multi-class, multi-ethnic rebellion of 6,000 armed protestors who opposed the effort of the Spanish colonial government to impose tariff reductions to flood local markets with cheap Spanish goods, increase taxes, and in other ways force economic integration between the colony and the Spanish economy.

Heckscher also provided the example of nineteenth century cross-national campaigns to ban slavery. She described the social movements in Europe that vigorously opposed the brutal Belgium colonial administration of the Congo at the end of the nineteenth century. She reflected on the efforts of the First International Workingmen's Association in Geneva to prohibit manufacturers from importing strikebreakers to replace striking workers. In the process workers from Europe and North America began to mobilize in solidarity against an increasingly cross-national capitalism.

Finally, in her brief survey she mentions the Anti-Imperialist Movement that opposed U.S. occupation and control of the Philippines after 1898.

Each of these movements addressed economic and political issues together. Each was a response to the globalization of a great power, usually in pursuit of economic exploitation. And each of these movements created a shared consciousness, a solidarity, among resisters across national boundaries. Perhaps we can say therefore that each of these movements represented a form of resistance to the globalization of capitalism.

Resistance to contemporary globalization

Ever since the emergence of the Bretton Woods system and the establishment of the power of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, peoples in poor countries have resisted the contracts their states entered into with global capitalism. Since the 1950s, workers and peasants have gone into the streets in countries as varied as Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and India to protest the cancellation of programs providing food subsidies, low cost public transportation, free water and sanitation, and other public services.

In November 1999 in Seattle, the visibility of such protests assumed a new dimension as thousands of protestors, representing a variety of issues and groups, shut down the annual meeting of the World Trade Organization. In the North American public mind, the "anti-globalization movement" was born.

The New Internationalist, a magazine representing "the people, the ideas, the action in the fight for global justice" published a chronology of "some key moments of the global movement 1994-2001." They symbolically identified the initiation of the current campaign for global justice with the public pronouncements of the indigenous Zapatista rebel movement in the southern Mexican province of Chiapas on January 1, 1994.

Their cry of "Ya Basta" ("Enough") was in response to the fact that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)went into effect on that day. A significant part of the NAFTA program was to be the privatization of communally owned land in Mexico.

Additional "key moments" included protests against the World Trade Organization, formed in 1995, an international conference against neo-liberalism held in Chiapas, Mexico, mass mobilizations against the Asian Pacific Economic Community, workers in 21 countries protesting the sacking of Liverpool dock workers, and repeated mobilizations against meetings of the International Monetary Fund, the World Economic Forum, and other public manifestations of neo-liberal globalization.

Indians at the World Social Forum in Belem Brazil, January 28, 2009, discus the rights of indigenous peoples. Photo by Andre Penner / AP.

The World Social Forum

At the dawn of the new century, a new tradition, inspired by the hundreds of years of resistance, was launched. Ten thousand activists -- representing 1,000 groups from 120 countries, industrial and agricultural workers, indigenous peoples, environmentalists, anti-globalization activists -- met at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in January 2001. This disparate assembly shared one idea: “Another World is Possible.”

Naomi Klein reported on this first WSF highlighting its exuberant and chaotic character. Neither defining it as a strength nor a weakness, she pointed out the fact that “...what seemed to be emerging organically out of the World Social Forum (despite the best efforts of some of the organizers) was not a movement for a single global government but a vision for an increasingly connected international network of very local initiatives, each built on direct democracy.”

Subsequent to the first WSF, the organizing committee prepared a “Charter of Principles” which included the following: providing an environment for open and democratic debate; becoming a permanent process of building alternatives, particularly building a “world process”; bringing together and linking civil society groups, NGOs, and social movements from all countries; and increasing “the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization” and introducing “onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices” that could create a “new world in solidarity.”

The U.S. Social Forum

Each year after, the WSF met in Brazil or India, or Kenya, or Venezuela. In 2007, a U.S. Social Forum was held in Atlanta, Georgia. Ten thousand people, mostly young and people of color attended the hundreds of panels and plenary sessions. Over 100 local and national groups displayed their literature and dialogued with conference participants.

As their call suggested: “The US Social Forum is more than a conference, more than a networking bonanza, more than a reaction to war and repression. The USSF will provide space to build relationships, learn from each other’s experiences, share our analysis of the problems our communities face, and bring renewed insight and inspiration.”

Now activists from nearly 100 organizations are preparing for the next U.S. Social Forum which will take place from June 22-26 in Detroit. It occurs in the midst of a global economic crisis, multiple wars, the rise of neo-fascist forces around the world, and efforts of the United States to forestall the rising global resistance to neoliberalism.

The National Planning Committee has indicated that the USSF will address movement building, organizing and outreach, and improving structure and programming of the USSF movement. Of particular relevance to 2010 are the following goals:

• Strengthen and expand progressive infrastructure for long-term collaboration and work for fundamental change.
• Disseminate effective models for democratic participation and movement building.
• Shape and influence the public conversation in ways that convey momentum and hope.
• Model diverse, representative movement building that is cross-cutting, democratic, and effectively integrates process and outcomes.
• Continue to be a space in which grassroots lead, while being inclusive of other sectors. Develop a collective systemic understanding and analysis of the current economic and political moment.
• Create a shared vision of the society and world that challenges poverty and exploitation, all forms of oppression, militarism and war, and environmental destruction.
• Articulate and practice concrete internationalism through consciousness of today’s global context and the power of radical movements in the Global South, and awareness of our power in coming from the U.S. and our responsibility to the broader international movement.
• Identify convergences that have already happened.
• Work toward greater convergence between working class struggles and progressive movements.
• Build on the strengths and convergences of the 2007 USSF.
• Further develop Black, Immigrant and Indigenous Nations’ solidarity.

The goals and vision of the U.S. Social Forum are truly ambitious. It is unclear how the Social Forum movement can create enough ideological commonality, organizational structure, leadership sensitivity to its grassroots base, and global solidarity to make another world possible. It is clear that the Social Forum movement is part of a long history of resistance and struggle against capitalism, and as such is as necessary now as at any time in history.

[Harry Tarq is a professor in American Studies who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical.]

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FARC in Colombia : A History of Armed Resistance

“Por la nueva Colombia, la patria grande y socialismo.”(“For the new Colombia, the greater fatherland, and socialism.") -- FARC motto. Photo from HubPages.

Armed struggle for land reform and justice:
Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia

By Marion Delgado / The Rag Blog / December 30, 2009

CARTAGENA DE INDIES, Colombia -- In May 2003 a leak from the Bush Treasury Department indicated that the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) was about to add to its extensive narcotics traffickers list. This time it would add someone in Colombia.

OFAC would be using one of the enlightened Republican Congress’s new drug war laws, the Foreign Narcotics Kingpin Designation Act. I was pretty sure who the new addition would be. The word "kingpin" was a dead giveaway.

It had to be the guy who had attained high office; whose brother had organized 20 or more death squads and maintained a couple of them out at the family hacienda; whose cousin in the Colombian Congress was the mouthpiece for those death squads as well as a close friend and promoter of various well known narcotrafficantes, including the legendary Pablo Escobar; someone whose own father was wanted by the Colombian police and the U.S. DEA for cocaine trafficking when he was killed in an abortive kidnap plot; and who himself was removed from his position as mayor of Medellín for having well-known ties to drug runners.

Who else could it be, but master criminal and El Presidente himself, Alvaro Uribe?

Imagine my surprise when it was announced the next day, that it was not Uribe after all, but the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- Peoples Army (FARC or FARC-EP) and 15 of their known or suspected leaders, even though I already knew they had to be a bad bunch of hombres. Five years before, in 1997, they were named a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the U.S. Department of State.

It couldn't have been easy to make it to the top of two government lists at the same time (the terrorist list and the narcotrafficantes list) and be the defining designees of a whole new hyphenated word, "Narco-terrorist"! That should keep them from gaining credibility with anyone with media access in the U.S.! I started wondering who these FARC guys were. Somebody needed to check them out, find out where they came from, and why.

The roots of FARC-EP

The current civil war in Colombia has been characterized by gross human rights violations, increasing dramatically over the past two decades. International human rights organizations have repeatedly singled out right-wing paramilitary groups (paracos) as being the principal perpetrators of human rights abuses.

The paracos are intertwined with the Colombian Armed Forces as they wage war against, not only the guerrillas, but anyone suspected of being a guerrilla sympathizer: union members, peasant organizers, human rights workers, and religious activists. Some paracos leaders have extended the parameters of the war against the guerrillas and their suspected fellow travelers to include drug addicts, alcoholics, prostitutes, petty criminals, and the homeless, in an attempt to “cleanse” Colombian society. Social cleansing is different from ethnic cleansing only in the presumed reasoning, it has the same results.

Over the years, several Colombian presidents have attempted to address the social, political, and economic injustices that are the principal causes of the conflict. However, these efforts have been repeatedly thwarted by the U.S. and its war on drugs, and by the Colombian political, economic, military elite, who are desperately trying to preserve a “democracy” that has disenfranchised much of the population.

News accounts often label the conflict a “35-year-old civil war,” counting its origin from the official formation of several guerrilla groups in mid-1960. However, the roots of Colombia’s largest guerrilla group, the FARC, date back to peasant armed self-defense movements formed between 1948 and 1958.

The National Front

During the 19th and early 20th centuries, Colombia's Liberal and Conservative parties, whose influence reached from Bogotá to virtually every village in settled regions of the country, dominated politics. Ideological differences between these elites reverberated throughout society, often resulting in outbreaks of violence that repeatedly pitted loyal Liberal and Conservative factions, both peasant and elite, against each other.

In the late 1940s, dissident Liberal Jorge Eliécer Gaitán emerged from the Liberal and communist-led agrarian and labor reform movements as the leading presidential candidate. On April 9, 1948, Gaitán was assassinated on a Bogotá street. The killing triggered a popular uprising by the Liberal lower classes that resulted in massive destruction and looting in the capital. This uprising, known as the Bogotazo, was the opening act of a 10 year period in Colombian history recalled as La Violencia.

Liberal peasant uprisings occurred throughout the country, pitting rural Liberals and Conservatives against each other. Fearing a peasant-led social rebellion, the elite Liberal leadership supported repression used by the Conservative government to quell the uprisings and preserve the elite oligarchy. But after two high-ranking Liberals were assassinated in 1949, the Liberals boycotted the 1950 presidential election, won uncontested by Conservative Laureano Gomez.

Although rebellion had been effectively quelled in Bogotá, sporadic armed peasant uprisings continued in several rural departments. Gomez, who considered Liberal peasants kin to Communists, responded to these with violent repression. Many Liberal members of the national police force were dismissed and replaced with peasants from the Conservative Boyacá district of Chulavista. The chulavistas became infamous for their brutal tactics in repressing rebellious Liberals and communists.

In the early 1950s, the Gomez regime, supported by the Catholic Church, which had been left out of the various negotiations during the uprisings, and by the U.S., which viewed Communist support for peasants in a Cold War prospective, elevated expression to new heights. Chaotic violence pitted rural Liberals and Conservatives against each other, and resulted in battles between the oligarchy and land-starved peasants. Many large landowners abandoned their properties, fleeing to the relative safety of the cities.

In 1953, Gomez was overthrown by a military coup that brought General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla to power. Rojas Pinilla immediately dispatched the military to reclaim the property of the large landowners still in the cities. In response, armed peasant groups called for agrarian reform.

In June, 1953, in an attempt to end the violence, Rojas Pinilla issued an amnesty to all the armed peasants and responded to their call for agrarian reform by creating the Office of Rehabilitation and Relief. In reality, this office did little to address the agrarian problem, yet the Liberal and Conservative elite felt that Rojas Pinilla was using it to build popular support for himself. To quell their suspicions, in June 1954 Rojas Pinilla extended the amnesty to right wing thugs imprisoned for acts of terror on behalf of the ruling Conservative elite and the Gomez regime.

Many of the Gomezistas released from jail immediately began killing peasants, forcing those that had accepted amnesty to again take up arms. Rojas Pinilla responded in 1955 by launching a major military offensive against the rearmed peasants that became known as La Guerra Villarica. It was in the department of Tolima during this offensive that the armed self-defense movements that would later evolve into the FARC came into existence. The Conservative and Liberal elite blamed the renewal of La Violencia on Rojas Pinilla, and in 1957 organized a general strike and street protests in the capital that forced him to resign.


Following the ouster of Rojas Pinilla, the Conservative and Liberal elite agreed on a power-sharing agreement, the National Front. Beginning in 1958, the parties alternated four-year terms in the presidency (no need to rig elections), and distributed all public positions evenly between the two parties. The formation of the National Front brought an end to the 19th century aspect of La Violencia: conflict between factions of the ruling class. However, the new government still had to contend with armed peasants, whose demand for land reform was being denied.

A FARC is born

According to a 2000 book by Alfredo Molano, Violence and Land Colonization, Violence in Colombia: The Contemporary Crisis in Historical Perspective, many peasants, mostly Liberals and Communists, survived the military offensives of the 1950s by undertaking long marches, under the protection of armed self-defense groups, to the mostly uninhabited eastern departments of Meta and Caquetá.

They cleared and worked new lands in areas they declared “independent republics," in an attempt to regain subsistence land and free themselves from a national government they distrusted due to “personal experience with social and economic partisanship and... the double value system upheld by the ruling classes.”

However, the colonists soon discovered they had not found the autonomy they so desperately sought. Large landowners, intent on increasing their own holdings, soon began laying claim to the newly cleared lands. Furthermore, the government had no intention of leaving the colonists alone.

“In defining these republics as gangs of communist bandits, the government had an excuse to launch military attacks against them, condemn them politically, and blockade them economically… The only possible outcome was war. One by one the republics fell to the army, and once they were under government control the land became concentrated in the hands of the large landowners,” Molano wrote.

The peasants, forced deeper into the jungle, realized their only chance of achieving social justice lay in their ability to wage war against the government on a national level. As a result, the armed self-defense movements dispersed units to various regions of the country to fight the army on several fronts simultaneously under a central command structure. On July 20, 1964, the various fronts of the armed self-defense movements issued their agrarian reform program. Two years later, they officially became known as the FARC.

Guerrilla groups begat guerrilla groups

In 1960, an independent political party, National Popular Alliance (ANAPO), formed by supporters of Rojas Pinilla was contending in congressional elections. ANAPO’s popularity increased steadily throughout the 1960's as it appealed to many who had been left out of the National Front alliance. Rojas Pinilla ran as ANAPO’s candidate in the 1970 presidential election and, after holding an early lead, was narrowly defeated by National Front candidate Misael Pastrana Borrero. Many ANAPO supporters accused the government of manipulating the vote count, and in response to perceived electoral fraud; socialist members of ANAPO formed the M-19 guerrilla movement in 1972.


M-19 gained notoriety through a series of daring urban raids that included the occupation of the Dominican Embassy in Bogotá in 1980 and an ill-fated takeover of the Palace of Justice in 1985. The latter resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people, including 11 Supreme Court judges, in a two-day battle in which the army leveled the massive courthouse. In 1989, M-19 guerrillas decided to lay down their weapons in return for a full government pardon. The ex-guerrillas formed a political party, the Democratic Alliance M-19, to participate in the upcoming elections; however, right-wing death squads soon assassinated many of the party’s leaders, including presidential candidate and former M-19 commander Carlos Pizarro.

M-19 had been formed as a response to the National Front, which successfully reserved positions of power for members of the Conservative and Liberal elite. This “limited democracy” spawned other guerrilla movements in the 1960’s. Other factors also came into play.

The Cuban Revolution influenced many radicals in Latin America, as it did in the U.S., convincing them that Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s foco theory of armed insurrection was the revolutionary road to follow. The Colombian Communist Party’s support of resolutions passed by the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, calling for a peaceful road to revolution, led many young Colombians to split from the Party in order to follow the Cuban model.

The Ejército Popular de Liberacion (Popular Army of Liberation, EPL) was thus formed in the department of Antioquia in the mid-1960’s. Following the Soviet-Chinese split, the EPL espoused the Maoist theory of a “prolonged popular war.” But after 1980 it began to distance itself from the goal of prolonged war and in August 1990 many members laid down their arms in order to participate in the political process, while a small dissident faction continued to fight in northern Colombia.


In 1964, university students who had recently returned from Cuba formed Colombia’s second-largest guerrilla group, the Army for National Liberation (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, ELN), in the department of Santander. The ELN adhered strictly to Che’s principles of rural guerrilla warfare and, in contrast to the M-19 and EPL, has so far refused to lay down its arms and participate in the political process. Sociologist Eduardo Pizarro says that, “In recent years the ELN has focused its activities almost exclusively on efforts to disrupt and destroy the oil industry, attacking with great success the pipelines of the north.”

In fact, between 1986 and 1997 the ELN was responsible for 636 pipeline bombings that resulted in $1.5 billion in lost revenue for the state-owned oil company, the oddly named Ecopetrol. For many years, the FARC and EPL denounced the ELN for pursuing a strategy of economic sabotage that has failed to increase its popular support. However, by the end of the 1990s, the FARC was also targeting pipelines used by multinational corporations to transport oil from remote drilling fields to coastal ports.

The FARC is the only Colombian guerrilla group with peasant roots that pre-date both the National Front and the Cuban Revolution. In contrast, the ELN, EPL and M-19 were all movements led by urban intellectuals, typical of many Latin American guerrilla groups that evolved in the 1960s, Cuban-inspired armed reactions to domestic political, social and economic situation.

FARCing cocaine…

The 1974 presidential election brought an end to the National Front alliance as Liberal and Conservative candidates again ran against each other. Sixteen years of National Front rule had reduced the number of killings -- in contrast with the 200,000 Colombians who died during La Violencia -- but had failed to address the agrarian issue and a dramatic increase in poverty.

During the National Front years, the percentage of the nation’s work force living in absolute poverty more than doubled, from 25% to 50.7%. Figures were even worse for the rural labor force, where the rate of absolute poverty soared from 25.4% to 67.5%. It is no surprise that when the coca boom began in the late 1970s, the lure of drug profits brought a massive migration of urban jobless and landless peasants to the predominantly FARC-controlled colonized regions.

Initially, the FARC was concerned that the new mass migration would undermine the political and social status quo in areas it controlled. At the same time, its income, from war taxes imposed on the local population in return for maintaining social order, increased dramatically.

New revenue enabled the rebel group to vastly improve its military capabilities, modernizing its weapons and improving the guerrilla fighter’s standard of living. In addition, the FARC was able to offer social and economic services “in the areas of credit, education, health, justice, registry, public works, and ecological and cultural programs.”

During the early years of the coca boom, the guerrillas and the drug lords worked together. Guerrillas controlled many of the coca growing regions while the cartels managed much of the cocaine production and trafficking.

However, this informal alliance collapsed when the leaders of drug cartels in Medellín and Cali began investing their new found wealth in property, primarily large cattle ranches, placing themselves firmly in the ranks of the guerrillas’ traditional enemy. The new narco-landowners soon began organizing their own paramilitary armies in order to fight the guerrillas and those they saw as guerrilla sympathizers.

Until today...

For 50 years the FARC and its predecessors have claimed to be fighting for agrarian reform and social justice for Colombia’s peasant population. The FARC has evolved into a powerful military force of 15,000 to 20,000 fighters who now control approximately 40% of the country. A U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) report issued in November 1997 found that "the Colombian Armed Forces could be defeated within five years unless the country’s government regains political legitimacy and its armed forces are drastically restructured.”

U.S. President Bill Clinton’s bizarre Drug Czar, Gen. Barry McCaffrey, echoed these findings when he claimed that Colombian democracy is seriously threatened by the growing military strength of the guerrillas.

Such statements lead one to believe that McCaffrey’s concept of “democracy” involves social order being “maintained” under a military state of siege, impunity for paramilitary forces who regularly massacre the civilian population, political candidates in opposition to the Conservative and Liberal elite being routinely assassinated, a judicial system paralyzed by fear, rigged and stolen elections, and thousands of peasants whose only economic means of survival is illicit coca production.

Indeed, if the ruling political, economic and military elite, aided by the paracos, continue to stifle truly democratic reform, the demise of Colombian “democracy” may well be inevitable.

For its part, the U.S. appears intent on “Salvadorizing” the conflict. Colombia, as was the case with El Salvador in the 1980’s, is today the hemisphere’s leading recipient of U.S. military aid. And it appears that Washington, in its attempt to prevent a guerrilla victory, is once again intent on supporting a repressive military closely allied to right-wing death squads. Such a policy will inevitably result in the continued suffering of the Colombian people, who are routinely subject to massacres, torture, disappearance, kidnapping, and forced displacement.

Any possibility of achieving a peaceful resolution to the conflict depends on the government’s ability to dismantle the paramilitary organizations and create a climate conducive to negotiations between the government and the guerrillas. Then, and only then, will it be possible to address the political, social, and economic causes of the conflict. So far the government has made little headway in eliminating the paracos.

The FARC is absolutely necessary to the survival of the large agrarian class of Colombia. Only land reform, justice, and true democracy will make it unnecessary; this is the only route to the elimination of FARC. Pointless and brutal alternatives, which will not result in the elimination of FARC-EP, is the way chosen by Hillary Clinton, Gates and Obama, sending more arms and U.S. troops, paid for with your money, to maintain civil war within Colombia and perhaps spread it to neighboring countries.

Note: Much research for this article came from various reports produced by the North American Congress on Latin America (NACLA); my thanks to them for keeping track of all this stuff over these many years. -- md

• For Marion Delgado's previous reports from Colombia on The Rag Blog, go here.

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Honduras : Anti-Coup Gay Activist Assassinated

LGBT activist Walter Tróchez was murdered this week.
He documented homophobic violence:
Honduran gay activist Walter Tróchez murdered

By Doug Ireland / December 18, 2009

Walter Tróchez, 25 years old, a well-known LGBT activist in Honduras who was an active member of the National Resistance Front against the coup d'etat there, was assassinated on the evening of December 13, shot dead by drive-by killers.

Tróchez, who had already been arrested and beaten for his sexual orientation after participating in a march against the coup, had been very active recently in documenting and publicizing homophobic killings and crimes committed by the forces behind the coup, which is believed to have been the motive for his murder. He had been trailed for weeks before his murder by thugs believed to be members of the state security forces.

In an open letter documenting this wave of political assassinations of Honduran queers he'd written last month entitled "Increase in hate crimes and homophobia towards LGTB as a result of the civic-religious-military coup in Honduras," Trochez had written that "Once again we say it is NOT ACCEPTABLE that in these past 4 months, during such a short period, 9 transexual and gay friends were violently killed, 6 in San Pedro Sula and 3 in Tegucigalpa."

At the end of this open letter, Tróchez declared that "As a revolutionary, I will always defend my people, even if it takes my life." Sadly, that's what happened.

American University Assistant Professor of Anthropology Adrienne Pine has translated into English on her blog a statement about the Tróchez murder by the Centro de Investigación y Promoción de los Derechos Humanos (CIPRODEH -- the Center for the Investigation and Promotion of Human Rights in Honduras), which you can find here.

In a moving statement about the Tróchez murder, the influential Honduran youth organization Los Necios said:

We met Walter fighting; we quickly saw within him an indisputable leader in the defense of human rights. As a member of the gay, lesbian, trans, and bisexual community he converted himself into a reference of this struggle in which the Honduran youth has developed with dedication from the breast of the Resistencia Contra el Golpe de Estado (resistance against the coup d'etat).

Recently he felt the direct threat of the fury of the irrationality, the reaction and the stupidity of the obsolete structural power that sadly today exists in Honduras. The repressive forces that serve the businessmen and kill Hondurans kidnapped him and warned him that he should silence himself, Walter, as was to be expected, said no.

It was a relief to know that he bravely escaped from the grip of the beast and it was heartwarming to see him again in the streets this past Friday 11 of December when the force of the La Resistencia was felt in the streets, of course the compañero Tróchez headed the march of the pueblo (nation). Walter Tróchez was shot in betrayal this past December 13; such is the method of cowards..."

(Full text in English of this statement is here.)

Adrienne e-mailed me that "Walter has been one of the most important figures in the LGBT community in Honduras for years. Unfortunately, most of what's written about him is in Spanish. A volunteer is translating one of his last open letters to the resistance condemning the large number of targeted political assassinations of members of the LGBT community since the coup, which I am pasting below (in case you read Spanish). That letter will be available in English on my website...[here]."

Amnesty International has issued a statement calling for an investigation of the murder, which you can read website here.

Radio Mundo's web site has a good article, in English, on the murder here .

Walter Tróchez's November 16 e-mail describing assassinations of Honduran LGBTers since the coup, in Spanish, is here.

© 2009 Doug Ireland

[Doug Ireland is a veteran political journalist. His blog is here.]

Source / CommonDreams

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Honduras : A Deal is Cut to Reinstate Zelaya

Zelaya supporter shouts slogans outside the National Congress. Photo from AFP.
Compromise deal restores Zelaya
Riot police meet demonstrators with tear gas

By David Holmes Morris / The Rag Blog / October 30, 2009

See Val Liveoak's analysis of the latest developments -- plus more photos -- Below.

After three weeks of negotiations in a Tegucigalpa hotel, representatives of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya and de facto President Roberto Micheletti have reached an agreement by which Zelaya may be reinstated to the position from which he was ousted in a coup d’état on June 28.

On the same day the accords were announced, the police and the military attacked the several hundred demonstrators outside the Clarión Hotel, where the talks were held, using teargas and beating and arresting an unknown number of protesters. “This government is committed to dialogue,” Micheletti declared in a press release announcing the agreement, “keeping to its goal of defending fundamental principles for the well being of our homeland.”

The agreement, announced late in the night of October 29, results from Micheletti’s concession that Zelaya’s restitution should be ratified by the legislature, as Zelaya had held, and not by the supreme court, as the golpista government had argued. Zelaya and his supporters had claimed that leaving the final decision to the court would constitute an admission that the president was removed from office by due process as a result of the crimes against the constitution that the golpistas have charged him with, while a legislative decision would imply he was removed by decree in a coup d’état.

The accord comes after the direct intercession of U.S. State Department undersecretary Thomas Shannon and follows weeks of efforts by representatives of the Organization of Ameican States.

The agreement would leave the final decision on Zelaya’s reinstatement up to the unicameral legislature, pending approval by the supreme court not of his reinstatement but of the legislature’s authority to decide the question. The court had declared several weeks earlier that it would abide by any decision reached in the talks.

The agreement also calls for formation of a “government of reconciliation,” presumably including at cabinet level representatives of all sectors of society; rejects a proposed amnesty for acts committed in connection with the political crisis; calls for recognition of the results of the November 29 elections; specifies the formation of a truth commission; and calls for asking the international community to remove sanctions imposed on the country as a result of the coup and to send observers to monitor the elections.

Riot police hurling tear gas at a march of Zelaya's supporters in Tegucigalpa, Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009. Photo by Arnulfo Franco.
Zelaya had agreed early in the negotiations to abandon efforts to organize a constituent assembly, efforts he had made earlier in response to popular pressure, which had sparked the coup. A national opinion poll on rewriting the constitution was scheduled for the same day he was ousted from office.

If actually reinstated, Zelaya will thus serve with no real power for the few weeks left before his term expires in January. “Returing to power might be symbolic,” a Honduran newspaper quotes him as saying two weeks ago, “but what cannot be permitted is that there be coups d’état in any country.”

Elimination of the question of a constituent assembly, central to the concerns of the resistance movement opposing the coup government, brought about the resignation of resistance leader Juan Barahona from Zelaya’s three-member negotiating team. “I didn’t sign [the agreement], I don’t agree with it,” Barahona told the press. “We are never going to renounce the constituent assembly. But we will continue supporting President Zelaya.” Barahona is a director of the Frente de Resistencia contra el Golpe de Estado.

Rafael Alegría, another director of the Frente, has been quoted in the press as declaring that the position of the group is “to continue demanding a constituent assembly and full democracy for the country.” He added, “Our position remains firm: the resistance will not back down, so we are still in the streets demanding President Zelaya’s reinstatement and demanding democracy."

“Zelaya is a symbol,” Salvador Zúñiga has been quoted as saying, “but he is not the definition.” Zúñiga is director of the Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras, the Civil Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras. Writing for La Jornada, journalist Arturo Cano says Zúñiga, part of Zelaya’s team of negotaitors in the earlier San José talks, belongs to a sector of the resistance seeking the formation of a “civilian junta” government which would call a constituent assembly within six months “to carry out the profound reforms the country needs, a possible solution given the deep crisis we are living through.”

Many observers say the golpista plan, as supported and promoted by the United States, is to reinstate Zelaya shortly before the November elections in order to create an appearance of legitimacy for the resulting government. The candidate for the rightist Partido Nacional, Pepe Lobo, is expected to win the presidency. Even with Zelaya back in office, large numbers of Hondurans are expected to boycott the elections. The October 29 agreement, reached a month before the November 29 elections, would seem to fit the alleged plan.

Ousted Honduran President Manuel Zelaya, with supporters, at the Brazilian embassy in Tegucigalpa, Friday, Oc.t 30, 2009. Photo by Esteban Felix.
Some reflections on the accord in Honduras:
The elite will still be in control

By Val Liveoak / The Rag Blog / October 30, 2009

The accord as described in the NYT article below is a mixed bag.

If all this had happened months ago it would have been great. Now, it leaves things on a road not only to the status before the ouster of President Zelaya, but actually before some of the progressive moves his government made.

To my knowledge, none of the registered candidates for President in the now to be recognized elections has offered to maintain his changes -- among them almost doubling the minimum wage, ties with ALBA countries, cheaper petroleum from Venezuela, etc. I doubt any will continue the call for a revision of the Constitution, the issue that sparked the ouster -- and was about much more than a change in limitations of presidential terms.

Nor will some of the setbacks instituted by the coup government -- and Congreso -- likely be rolled back. These include privatization of power, water and forest resources which were put into effect, I was told, within a few days of the coup. (There's talk of selling off the Copan Ruins, the jewel of tourism in Honduras, as well.) In fact, it remains to be seen if the ministers/cabinet members that the coup regime replaced will be able to return to any sort of effective administration in the few months left of Zelaya's term.

It will be interesting to see how the Resistance coalition responds. They have been calling for delayed elections in which they have the time and security to mount an effective opposition candidate. If they were able to do this, considering their numbers (I believe 75-80% of the population) they would be able to win considerable power in a new government.

Even assuming the government that is elected in November will protect human rights and provide security to opposition candidates, will they be willing to wait for another election cycle? Will the new government make real efforts to address their concerns?

Roberto Micheletti: "Committed to dialogue." Photo by Tiempo.
An effective Truth commission would be a very good step. We'll see how it resolves the dilemma between a superficial reconciliation and actually punishing human rights violations. We'll also see if the new administration after the elections will rein in the security forces in the face of what I expect to be fairly widespread and likely militant opposition. Will formal "legal" repression via security forces and non-formal repression via death squads or paramilitary forces become the standard operating procedure?

In some accounts of the agreement there was more emphasis on the efforts of the OAS. But it looks to me like the U.S.' efforts chiefly seem to be aimed at legitimizing the November elections (which cannot be the engine for any real change in Honduras unless something changes very fast).

The question is, would an election not accepted by the world have been worse than the one that will return the status quo? Given the reality of the probable results of the elections, it will be extremely important for U.S. and world policy to emphasize protection of human rights of the now large and united opposition.

If the opposition continues to meet violent repression or even finds itself incapable of making changes that Honduras needs to reduce the terrible levels of poverty in the country, the possibility of pressure from some sources for an armed insurgency are likely to increase.

The elite of Honduras will win the election in November, I believe. If they continue to do things as they have done throughout the last four months, Honduras is ripe for revolution.

Here's what the NYT has to say.

Deal Reached in Honduras to Restore Ousted President
By Elisabeth Malkin / October 30, 2009

MEXICO CITY -- A lingering political crisis in Honduras seemed to be nearing an end on Friday after the de facto government agreed to a deal, pending legislative approval, that would allow Manuel Zelaya, the deponed president, to return to office.

The government of Roberto Micheletti, which had refused to let Mr. Zelaya return, signed an agreement with Mr. Zelaya's negotiators late Thursday that would pave the way for the Honduran Congress to restore the ousted president and allow him to serve out the remaining three months of his term. If Congress agrees, control of the army would shift to the electoral court, and the presidential election set for Nov. 29 would be recognized by both sides.

Honduran resistance leaders Juan Barahona (left) and Rafael Alegría. Photo by TeleSUR.
On Friday, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called the deal "an historic agreement."

"I cannot think of another example of a country in Latin America that, having suffered a rupture of its democratic and constitutional order, overcame such a crisis through negotiation and dialogue," Mrs. Clinton said in Islamabad, where she has been meeting with Pakistani officials.

The accord came after a team of senior American diplomats flew from Washington to the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, on Wednesday to press for an agreement. On Thursday, the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, Thomas A. Shannon Jr., warned that time was running out for an agreement.

Mr. Micheletti's government had argued that the Nov. 29 election would put an end to the crisis. But the United States, the Organization of American States and the United Nations suggested they would not recognize the results of the elections without a pre-existing agreement on Mr. Zelaya's status.

"We were very clearly on the side of the restoration of the constitutional order, and that includes the elections," Mrs. Clinton said in Islamabad.

According to Mr. Micheletti, the accord reached late Thursday would establish a unity government and a verification commission to ensure that its conditions are carried out. It would also create a truth comisión to investigate the events of the past few months.

The agreement also reportedly asks the international community to recognize the results of the elections and to lift any sanctions that were imposed after the coup. The suspension of international aid has stalled badly needed projects in one of the region's poorest countries. Negotiators for both men were expected to meet Friday to work out final details. It was not clear what would happen if the Honduran Congreso rejected the deal.

Passage could mean a bookend to months of international pressure and political turmoil in Honduras, where regular marches by Mr. Zelaya's supporters and curfews have paralyzed the capital.

Latin American governments had pressed the Obama administration to take a forceful approach to ending the political impasse, but Washington had let the Organization of American States take the lead and endorsed negotiations that were brokered by the Costa Rican president, Óscar Arias. But those talks stalled in July.

Demonstrators outside Clarión Hotel. Photo by Indymedia Honduras.
New negotiations began earlier this month but broke down two weeks ago. With the Honduran elections approaching, the United States chose to step up pressure and dispatched Mr. Shannon, along with Dan Restrepo, the senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs at the National Security Council.

Some Honduran political and business leaders have argued that the military coup that ousted Mr. Zelaya on June 28 was a legal response to his attempts to rewrite the Constitution and seek re-election. But that constituency was also concerned by his deepening alliance with Venezuela's leftist president, Hugo Chávez.

Mr. Zelaya, who was initially deposited in Costa Rica, still in his nightclothes, sneaked back into the country on Sept. 21 and has been living at the Brazilian Embassy since then. It was unclear when Mr. Zelaya would be able to leave the embassy, which has had Honduran soldiers posted outside. The de facto government had said it would arrest him if he came out.

Source / New York Times

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