By Ariela Ruiz Caro

After President Ollanta Humala’s state visit to Venezuela Jan 7, and despite some adverse reactions to the visit in Peru, Humala announced that the two countries have “succeeded in turning away from the bilateral politics of the past in which nothing major had been accomplished in diplomatic, commercial and cultural relations.”

In effect, the two presidents reached new agreements in the areas of trade, energy, education, social programs and economy, as well as migratory regulation.

A top priority of the visit was to maintain, insofar as possible, the Commercial Liberation Program negotiated within the Andean Community (CAN). Venezuela withdrew from CAN on April 22, 2006, claiming that Colombia and Peru’s free trade agreements with the United States, “created a new legal body that tried to assimilate the regulations of free trade into the Andean Community, changing de facto its nature and original principles.” The Foreign Minister at the time, Alí Rodriguez, who is in line to become the next Secretary General of Unasur, sent a letter to CAN members in which he denounced the Cartagena Agreement, and consequently announced the withdrawal of Venezuela from CAN. Nonetheless, Venezuela remained within the Commercial Liberation Program for five years following its decision to withdraw from the CAN, which now consists only of Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Ecuador.

After leaving the Andean organization, Venezuela solicited admission as a full member of Mercosur (a trade association of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay). Currently, Venezuela only needs the approval of Paraguay’s congress to join Mercosur, which gave the country the status of “state-in-process” at December’s Presidential Summit of Mercosur in Montevideo. At the same summit, the Ecuadorian government also solicited its incorporation as a full member of Mercosur.

The CAN’s Andean Commercial Liberation Program has been delayed three times since April 2011, and a partial, complementary commercial accord is still in the works with another trade group- the Latin American Integration Association (ALADI). As opposed to a typical free trade agreement, the program only includes aspects related to the sale of goods.

During President Humala’s visit, the leaders signed a “framework agreement” in which both countries agree to liberalize trade in exportable goods. Using this as a starting point, they will continue negotiating other aspects of the agreement, including rules of origin, health requirements, and others. As opposed to the CAN’s “Free Trade Zone” that eliminates the whole structure of customs, the agreement will apply to a limited number of goods.

Ninety-six percent of Peruvian goods exported to Venezuela are non-traditional products, mostly textile, chemical and mechanical/metal sectors. In spite of problems that Venezuela’s currency can cause some Peruvian exporters, this deal is important to and will empower this market.

The agreements reached in the energy sector, especially the agreement between the national oil companies, have caused an outcry from some important political sectors and businesses that have labeled them “extremely dangerous” for the country and “a perverse vehicle for installing Venezuelan methods in Peru.”

The memorandum of understanding between the state-run oil companies Petróleos de Venezuela (PDVSA) and PetroPeru seeks only to establish means of cooperation on issues of mutual economic interests in hydrocarbons, including exploration, mining, transport, storage, refining and commercialization, as well as in oil services, petrochemicals and training in hydrocarbons.

An executive committee will be named to comply with these objectives. The committee is charged with seeking approval from public entities and corresponding governments and with bringing them to the practice by means of subscribing to specific accords that will be directly formalized or formalized through their subsidiaries or branches. A timeline has been established for envoys from Venezuela to visit Peru in mid-January. Peruvian envoys will reciprocate the visit the following week, which the media is utilizing to generate a fear campaign.

The two countries haven’t only left behind multilateral negotiations for trade issues. The relationship between Venezuela and the Andean countries in the energy sector also has been “bilateralized”. The CAN took up the Petro-Andean Energy Initiative during the XVI Andean Presidential Summit in July 2005 in Lima. This was presented as a common platform or strategic alliance of the state oil and energy companies of the five CAN countries. The objective was to increase electric and gas interconnection in the region, the mutual provision of energy resources, and joint investment in electrical projects.

At that Presidential Summit, leaders of the Andean countries created the “Presidential Act of Lima: Democracy, Development and Social Cohesion”, which explores the benefits of formulating a shared Andean agenda on energy in the context of South American integration. It took into account existing bi-national accords and the energy potential represented by the area’s supply of petroleum deposits, coal and gas reserves, water, solar, wind and other alternative energy sources.

At the same time, the CAN’s Council of Ministers on Electricity, Hydrocarbons, and Mines recognized how the impacts of international oil price volatility underline the importance of structuring a strategic alliance to strengthen the stability and development of their countries.

However, the Venezuela-proposed Petroandina coalition never panned out. Shortly after the failure of Petroandina, Venezuela left the CAN, but Venezuela agreed to bilateral energy cooperation with former Andean associates Bolivia and Ecuador. And in November of 2005, Colombia and Venezuela signed the Declaration of Punto Fijo, which led to the construction of the Colombian—Venezuelan gas pipeline, opened in 2007.

With the recent agreement, Peru becomes the last Andean country to explore energy cooperation with the most important energy power in the region.

Ariela Ruiz Caro is an economist who currently works as an international consultant on trade, integration, and natural resources at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL), the Economic System of Latin America (SELA) and the Institute for the Integration of Latin America and the Caribbean (INTAL), among others. She worked for the Andean Community (CAN) from 1985 to 1994 and as an assessor for Mercosur’s Commission of Permanent Representatives between 2006 and 2008. She collaborates as a columnist with the Americas Program.

History has not been kind to the indigenous Raramuri people of the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. Pushed to remote mountains of a harsh land by Spanish and mestizo colonists, the Raramuri managed to hang on to their culture while eking out an existence based on rain-fed farming and small herd grazing. In recent decades their lands have been invaded again, this time by cattlemen, loggers, miners, dope growers, tourism developers, and soldiers.

According to Mexican analyst and farm activist Victor Quintana, the United Nations named six municipalities with a large Raramuri presence as among the 10 least-developed indigenous municipalities in Mexico in 2005.

Ironically, Quintana wrote in a recent column, the Raramuri suffer water shortages and malnutrition while from their Sierra Tarahumara springs the headwaters of rivers that nourish commercial, export-oriented agriculture in the “fertile valleys” below.

“Richness and prosperity on the lower river: misery where the water is born,” Quintana wrote. “And the rich Sinaloan, Sonoran, Baja Californian and Chihuahuan growers don`t pay a single cent for environmental services to the indigenous people of the Chihuahua mountains.”

In another metaphoric twist to the Raramuri crisis, Chihuahua state officials are considering slaughtering thousands of wild pigs that regularly cross the border from Texas and devour what little cover is left on a rain-starved land. The meat, which one state official insisted was “tasty” and low in fat content, would then be shipped to hungry indigenous communities in the mountains.

The Raramuri are fast becoming a political football in a sharpening national struggle ostensibly over climate change and agricultural policy, but also intimately tied to free trade, food sovereignty and corporate consolidation of the food supply. Recently, Mexican media have been filled with stories about drought and hunger devastating the homeland of a people known for their long-distance running skills and passionate Easter season festivities.

An unconfirmed report of a mass suicide by distraught Raramuris received special scrutiny. Chihuahua state officials refuted the story, and National Water Commission head Jose Luis Luege, who was just nudged out of the conservative National Action Party (PAN) primary for the Mexico City mayoral race, put his foot in his mouth when he claimed there was no problem in the Sierra Tarahumara since the Raramuris had access to alternative water sources.

Confronted with reality, Luege later retracted. In fact, drought has been a recurrent problem in the Sierra Tarahumara since at least the 1990s, and thousands of Raramuris have since fled their homes for Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua City and other urban refuges.
The degree to which Raramuris have become pawns in an ongoing chess game of socio-politics was amply exhibited earlier this month when hundreds of indigenous residents of the Sierra Tarahumara were transported en masse to an event attended by Chihuahua Governor Cesar Duarte and Enrique Pena Nieto, the 2012 presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).

Although the event organizers said their intention was to familiarize national leaders with the Raramuri’s plight, indigenous people who attended the meeting were quoted in Mexico’s Proceso newsweekly saying they had no idea why they were brought to it. “They haven’t explained anything,” said Raramuri Francisco Mariano Gonzalez. “They could have brought us to hear these talks they are giving us,” Gonzalez speculated.

Reportedly, the man in charge of the acarreo–the Mexican word for carting people in to buff up political campaign events–was a former mayor of Guadalupe y Calvo, a violence-torn town located in heart of the Sierra Tarahumara’s narco country.

The former elected official’s stint in government apparently was good practice for his career as an actor in B-grade drug trafficking films like “Lead in the Sierra”.

Indigenous Pay the Price of Climate Change

Despite its spectacular and even surreal elements, the Raramuri episode was but the latest chapter in a deep-seated rural crisis worsened by climate change and neo-liberal economic policies.

A triple plague of floods, drought and freezes slammed nearly 70 percent of the country’s 26 million arable hectares in 2011 according to government officials, academic researchers, and farm organizations cited in the media. While drought alone has been particularly severe in the northern states, the lack of rainfall is also creating emergency situations for producers in places like Jalisco and Aguascalientes.

The federal Secretariat of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries (Sagarpa) acknowledges that 19 Mexican states are affected by the worst drought in 70 years.

Nationwide, upwards of a half-million cattle have died and some water wells have dried up, according to a slew of reports. In 2011 an estimated 20 percent of Mexico’s vital corn crop withered up in the face of adverse weather, according to the Mexican newspaper La Jornada. Production of another food staple, beans, is also down.

Climate disasters have contributed to pushing up food prices across the country. Puerto Vallarta tamale seller Estela Hernandez said it costs her two more pesos this year than last for a kilo of corn flour needed to make her product. As for the drought, Hernandez said it had not yet affected her supply. “There is plenty of corn flour now,” she added. “I don’t know about later.”
Max Correa, general secretary of the Central Campesina Cardenista, told La Jornada that price hikes of agricultural products could range from 100 to 150 percent this year.

Both farmers and consumers are already feeling a stinging pinch. A wave of price increases for eggs, beans and tomatoes, as well as the gasoline and the highway tolls required to get products to market, slapped Mexicans at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012.

Perhaps most wrenching was yet another jump in the cost of staple corn tortillas, which rose in price from about 6 pesos per kilo at the end of 2006 to more than 12 pesos in many cities surveyed by the Economy Ministry at the end of last year. During the same time period, the average minimum wage increased from 48.67 pesos to 59.82 pesos; the ability of a daily minimum wage to purchase tortillas plummeted from 8.1 kilos in 2006 to 5.3 in 2011.

To compensate for a corn production downturn, Mexico is importing the product from abroad, especially from the United States. Corn imports surged 69.6 percent from January to September 2011, costing Mexico about $2.1 billion, an amount sharply up from the approximately $1.2 billion spent on imports during the same period in 2010.

Mexico’s experience is similar to that of many other developing nations, according to a new report by the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy and the Global Development and Environment Institute.

The report blamed commodity speculation, biofuel production and “land grabs” for big hikes in global food prices from 2007 to 2008 and again from 2010 to 2011. While governments have taken some positive steps to address the food crisis, no real structural reforms to avert “another devastating spike in global food prices” have been undertaken, the report’s authors concluded.

Not everyone is losing out from a spiraling price cycle. The increase is connected to environmental issues, but it’s also heavily influenced by the gambles of finance capital, the hegemony of free trade and the corporate domination of the food chain.

Foreign food exporters, large domestic food processors and multinational and national supermarket chains all stand to gain from a loss in food self-sufficiency. Big box stores like Walmart sell tortillas at a lower price than do the mom-and-pop stores traditionally frequented by Mexicans. For instance, the US-based giant sells tortillas in a Puerto Vallarta store for 9.90 pesos per kilo, compared with the 14-15 pesos a kilo charged by the smaller tortilla outlets.

Taking a cue from the profit-making trick of leading buyers to think they have gotten a bargain by simply selling less for more, the rapidly expanding OXXO convenience store chain now sells three-quarter kilo packages of tortillas for 10.50 pesos.

Mexico’s food crisis has yet to acquire the status of a primary national issue, but different forces are beginning to push the issue into the center stage of national political life.

In what is likely to be the largest protest of its kind since 2008, Mexico’s main farm organizations plan to converge on the capital city during the last days of January to demand more government assistance.

“This is the first social movement that the country sees rising up because of climate change,” wrote analyst Victor Quintana. “More and more will rise up even stronger if the government continues on without understanding what is happening.”

Sparking the protests was President Calderon’s veto last month of an extra assistance package for Mexican farmers valued at about $900 million and approved by the opposition-controlled lower house of the Mexican Congress. In an election year such as 2012, the issue of who has control over government spending is a touchy matter as different political forces always suspect rivals of using their offices and budgets to influence voters.

The domestic battle contrasts with the Calderon administration’s support for extra funding from developed nations for the Green Climate Fund. And as the new president of the G-20 group of nations, Mexico is likely to lobby for more climate aid from the wealthier members. The Calderon administration considers Mexico to be in the vanguard of “green growth.”

While political considerations inevitably surround the internal climate politics debate, it could be said that at least Mexican elected officials accept the scientific consensus of climate change, unlike in the US where what passes for debate is still splashed by denial, dumbness and dodging.

At home, the Calderon administration is aggressively defending its domestic climate actions.

“Addressing the effects of the drought is a priority for the administration of President Felipe Calderon because it affects a good portion of the population, in particular, the most vulnerable Mexicans,” said Sagarpa Secretary Francisco Mayorga.

As evidence of the federal government’s attentiveness, Sagarpa said about $1.3 billion had been budgeted for mitigation and prevention programs in 2012. Among the measures already in motion or in the works for the coming days are crop substitution, water harvesting, pasture re-planting, sustainable range management and temporary employment. Also, the government plans on spending about $90 million on catastrophic insurance for “climatic and natural phenomena.”

Whether the government’s rural rescue policies can even lay the basis for turning around the countryside is another matter entirely. Under the current rules of the economic game, Mexico’s agricultural economy is ruled by free trade agreements, especially NAFTA, while middle-men merchants and big corporations control the transport and marketing of products as they travel from the country to the city.

On the land, the bigger and politically-connected farmer associations stand poised as always to benefit from any further injections of government aid. Large tracts of irrigated land and pasture are devoted to supplying the US market. Last November alone, 189,000 cattle were shipped north across the border, according to the beef industry publication Drovers Cattle Network. The Mexican government’s rural relief package will not disturb any of these profitable but increasingly ecologically-harmful economic arrangements.

It’s still too early to tell if the new farm protest movement will sow a seed for a 21st century agricultural model based on domestic marketplace reform, trade renegotiation and sustainable farming practices.

Many of the organizations involved in the January 31 protest are connected to political parties and, if organizers do not stake out a clear posture of independence, it’s likely their demands will be channeled into the ballot bin.
Previous national protest movements in 2003 and 2008 resulted in government subsidies, loans and other forms of short-term aid for a failing countryside but did not lay the foundations for a truly healthy rural economy.

In turn, the farm organizations largely pulled back from public protest. Demands for the renegotiation of NAFTA fell by the wayside, and an increasing number of farmers simply withdrew from the legal economy to cultivate opium poppies and marijuana as a way of staying on the land.

But with climate change becoming an ever and ever bigger factor in Mexico’s rural politics, the contradictions of temporary, politically-brokered fixes, whether in the Raramuri country or elsewhere, are becoming ever more acute.

Kent Paterson is a freelance journalist who covers the southwest of the United States, Mexico, and Latin America, and he is an analyst for the Americas Program.

Raúl Zibechi

“My wife washed her face with rain water the day after they fumigated farmland about three kilometers from here and she started getting rashes on her arms and her body. That was a year ago. Now she’s very affected, she’s been diagnosed with lupus and is undergoing chemotherapy.” Jorge Mérola, a farmworker from Villa del Carmen in the middle of Uruguay’s soy region, speaks from the depths of a pain that is easy to understand, but almost impossible to relay to others.

A local doctor explained that the marks on Mérola’s skin are caused by “agrochemicals” sprayed over fields from small planes. “Six of my calves died with the same symptoms. They go stiff, they have no muscular mobility, and their jaws lock. The same thing happened to some neighbors,” he explains between long pauses.

When asked why he didn’t report what happened to his wife, Mérola reveals his abysmal distrust of authorities: “I didn’t want to report this to the Ministry of Livestock because a while ago there were a lot of fish dying in the Yi river, and their response was that it was because there wasn’t enough oxygen in the water. With that kind of response, I didn’t want to report anything.”

Mérola’s testimony is one of the many included in the video Collateral Damages (Efectos Colaterales), a documentary made by Redes Amigos de la Tierra Uruguay (Friends of the Earth in Uruguay) and the Programa Uruguay Sustentable (Sustainable Uruguay Program). Reporters Ignacio Cirio and Edgardo Matiolli led the production and it will be released in early February. It can be found on Radio Mundo’s web page. It’s the first visual work that presents proof of the serious human consequences of fumigations.

Breaking the Silence

All the workers interviewed by Cirio demonstrate a keen understanding of the changes in local production: the introduction of crops like soy and fumigation with agrochemicals, the spread of monoculture farming to such an extent that “you see yourself getting closed in on,” as Isabel Olivo, from the Rural Women’s Group Network, puts it. Despite being active in grassroots organizations, Olivo admits “you feel like you have no weapons to fight it.”

Mérola’s case shows the solitude of those affected by fumigations—a solitude characterized by the distance and absence of the State and the complicity of actors like doctors who should be playing an active role. In spite of the seriousness of what happened to his wife, Mérola did only one interview, on the Sarandí del Yi radio station, which Cirio picked up and turned into the beginning of his investigation. Today his project is one of the very few to break the silence.

“Those affected don’t see the State as an entity that guarantees their rights,” he affirms, after traveling hundreds of kilometers across the areas most affected by fumigations like Florida, Flores, Durazno, Paysandú and Salto.

“Professor Elsa Gomez filed a complaint after her school was sprayed two times in a row. When public health workers interviewed her, they demanded proof that would link the health problems with agrochemicals. The State doesn’t protect them, but it makes demands of them,” concludes Cirio. Gomez teaches in a small town in the province of Durazno. In Collateral Damages she explains how the planes sprayed pesticides just meters from the school over the course of several days in 2009 without anyone showing, at least publicly, the slightest sign of concern.

“There are many things that people don’t want to come out and say, because they’re neighbors, because they rely on each other, but I know of cases that have been covered up and I see how they go out to fumigate with broken equipment,” says Luis Ferreira, who was president of the school commission in Merinos, in the province of Paysandú. His son, like other children, has stomach problems and vomits every time the planes fumigate less than 100 meters away from the school.

In his film, Cirio interviews beekeepers who have watched their hives disappear, small-scale livestock owners and farmers, village neighbors, nurses and teachers who discover the consequences of agrochemicals for their students’ bodies. He didn’t interview any doctors. When asked about the silence of those who are aware of the situation and its causes, he reflects: “Businesses make deals with schools, social clubs and hospitals. The doctors don’t say anything.”

On several occasions the team that made Collateral Damages had problems with “mosquito” (a vehicle for land fumigation) drivers who saw them filming. Some of them got out of their vehicles and wanted to know what the piece was about. “They have orders not to let themselves be filmed,” Cirio concludes.

In spite of the difficulties, he found that rural and small town inhabitants were aware of the growing problem they are facing. This is because, among other things, “they are informed, they travel, they ask questions and, for this reason, they demand that the government carry out an in-depth study of the situation.” Onelia Dominguez, a nurse’s assistant in the town of Rincón de Valentín, believes that the workers don’t demand adequate working conditions because they’re afraid they’ll lose their jobs. She agrees with Cirio that “no one has ever come to investigate.”

Overcoming the Solitude

Although the indifference of both the government and the university is the main cause for the silence among the victims, this is also a population with little opportunity to make itself heard.

In March of 2001, the Uruguayan Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fishing prohibited aerial spraying closer than 500 meters from schools and land spraying closer than 300 meters “to diminish the risk of exposure to intrinsically dangerous substances.” But to comply with the rules, someone must control or report abuses. Isabel Cárcamo, from the Red de Acción en Plaguicidas (RAP-AL), said, “We have had the experience of working with communities that find it very difficult to denounce the impact of fumigations, either because they have relatives working in crop-dusting or because it’s their livelihood, or because they live in small towns where everyone knows everyone and the business even ‘helps’ the community.”

It’s the same problem that the anthropologist Carlos Santos detected. Beekeepers, for example, “confront the dilemma of not reporting the death rate of the bees so they don’t get kicked off the place where they’ve been allowed to set up their hives or lose whatever space they have,” because filing a complaint causes trouble for the landowner who rents the land used for growing soy.

Dr. María Elena Curbelo pointed out that in the vicinity of Bella Unión, an agroindustrial city where she’s been working for 16 years, rice and sugar cane plantations are sprayed with pesticides. This has led to congenital deformities in newborns and year-round respiratory problems.

She affirmed that there are various cases of pediatric leukemia in the region. She recognized that “while there were fumigations on the edge of town and one part of the population wanted to complain, the workers preferred to not risk their jobs and the people opted to remain silent.”

Most people affected by fumigation live in small towns, where everyone knows each other and there exists a persistent “cultura de esperar”–a culture of expecting someone else to solve their problems. People look to rural bosses (caudillos), landowners, and now businessmen or the government. In Uruguay, they are small towns with between 400 and two thousand inhabitants.

The rural population is systematically declining throughout Latin America. Uruguay is perhaps the most alarming case– only five percent of Uruguayans live in rural areas. Adults between the ages of 50 to 65 represent 42% of the rural population. It’s not hard to conclude that the population is in a slow process of extinction. The model of production with its disastrous health effects adds to out-migration by making rural life inhospitable.

“The Ministry of Public Health can’t recruit doctors who want to live in these places. Under such conditions,” Cirio says, “there’s an awareness of the seriousness, but there are only a few isolated efforts made with little support from organizations or professional associations.”

Cárcamo insists that powerful interests are behind the silence surrounding the effects of agrochemicals. “There is no political interest. If there were, it would be necessary to question the country’s so-called production model and the use of biofuel, among other things. The issue will really only be exposed when a political decision is made. One example is the contrast between the aggressive campaign against tobacco, while nothing is said about the impacts of the daily ingestion of agrochemicals through food and water. And the worst thing is that smoking is something you can choose, but eating and drinking water aren’t.”

Brazil, World Champion in Agrochemicals

According to a recent report by the Movimento Sem Terra (MST), Brazilian society is more and more aware of the health problems caused by agrochemical contamination. “Toxins are one of the pillars that sustain the agribusiness production model,” the organization affirms. It defines the model as export-oriented and characterized by the expulsion of families from the countryside.

Since 2008, Brazil holds first place in world rankings of agrochemical use, even though it is not the largest agricultural producer. Billions of liters are poured onto crops, and this is a practice that even the MST has not escaped. In 2010, a national campaign against agrochemicals was born and created official entities like the National Cancer Institute (INCA), Fiocruz and the Sanitary Vigilance Agency. Specialists have no doubt that agrochemicals are related to cancer. According to the INCA, in the next two years one million Brazilians will be diagnosed with cancer and only six out of every ten of those affected will recover. Furthermore, there will be consequences for millions of people who experience a number of afflictions every year. In a recent conference in Rio de Janeiro, Joâo Pedro Stédile, MST coordinator, complained that in the movement’s settlements “there are instances of breast cancer in 13 and 14 year-old girls” (Carta Maior, December 20).

Brazil’s 2011 Human Rights report, released in December by the Social Network of Justice and Human Rights explains that each year 5,600 people are poisoned with agrochemicals while only half the cases are reported. Based on reports from the Ministry of Health, the report concludes that every year there are 2,300 “suicide attempts” made with agrochemicals. The southern region prides itself on agribusiness, but at the same time this model explains 75 percent of deaths there. This surprising revelation led various scientists to undertake field studies.

One study published in the Revista Brasileira de Saúde Ocupacional by the Ministry of Labor notes the connection between suicides and the massive use of agrochemicals because organophosphates, among other things, produce psychological disorders. “Scientific evidence shows that exposure to pesticides can cause irrevocable health damages. For example, advanced neuropathy is a result of overexposure to organophosphates. Indeed, exposure is associated with a long list of symptoms and with significant deficits in neurobehavioral performance and abnormalities in nervous system functions.

The journal of the Brazilian Association of Postgraduates in Public Health also published case studies based on a survey of 102 rural workers from Nova Friburgo. They concluded that there is a direct relationship between emotional and psychological disturbances and exposure to agrochemicals.

Argentina: Doctors in Fumigated Towns

In the agricultural cycle of 1990, the Argentine countryside received 35 million pounds of pesticides. In 2010, agribusinesses used more than 300 million liters of toxins. The numbers continue to grow. In 1996, when fumigation with glyphosate began, about two liters were used per hectare. By 2010, the figure had increased to more than ten liters, and there is some land fumigated with more than twenty liters per hectare.

This data was presented during the First National Conference of Doctors in Fumigated Towns, in August 2010 in Córdoba, Argentina. The conference was held by the Department of Medical Sciences of the National University of Cordoba. A hundred and sixty doctors from ten provinces and dozens of towns attended.

The conference led to the creation of the University Environment and Health Network, committed to following up on health problems created by agrotoxins.

The event’s final report states, “The doctors pointed out that, generally speaking, they have served the same populations for more than 25 years, but they find that recent years have been completely different, and they link the differences directly to systematic fumigation with pesticides.” Rodolfo Páramo, pediatric and neonatal doctor at the Malabrigo hospital in the Norte de Santa Fe reported the disturbing rate of twelve deformations of 200 births in 2006.

The neonatal service at the Perrando Hospital in Resistencia, Chaco, released its own statistics: in 1997, there were 19.5 deformities in every 10,000 newborns. In 2008, the number tripled to 85.3. In the same period, the land area planted in soybeans in the province quadrupled.

The final conference report took into account the many testimonies and reports presented and concluded, “It’s important to point out that official epidemiological reports are scant. According to what the doctors say —relying on their own figures acquired through observation— public health officials haven’t heeded the alarm from health groups and reports from the general population.” The Chaco report is “one of the only such reports generated publicly with interjurisdictional participation.”

Medardo Ávila Vázquez, coordinator of the medical network, stated that despite the scientific evidence presented, authorities from national and health care sectors are unwilling to accept reality and, in particular, unwilling to acknowledge the pathological changes in the rural population.

He decided to work with groups like the Mothers of Ituzaingó, a neighborhood group in Córdoba surrounded by soy where 300 out of 5,000 inhabitants have cancer, or the Stop Fumigating Collective that opted to protest instead of dying in silence. This group insists that “there is no controllable or safe fumigation,” which is why all fumigation should be stopped.

The Ituzaingó case shows that fumigations affect the poorest of the poor. Without organization and public protest, nothing will be gained. Back in 2002 the Mothers condemned “endosulfan and heavy metals in water tanks in people’s homes,” but to this day their children keep dying of leukemia and suffering from deformities.

Avila’s data is deeply disturbing. “There are more than 12 million people affected by fumigation in the country. In these areas, the rate of birth defects is four times higher than in the cities. Cancer is responsible for 33% of deaths in Barrio Ituzaingó—the leading cause of death— while in big cities the primary causes are cardiovascular problems, which accounts for 27% of the deaths, followed by cancer at 19%.”

Raul Zibechi is an international political analyst from the weekly Brecha de Montevideo, a professor and researcher on grassroots movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to many grassroots groups He writes the monthly “Zibechi Report” for the Americas Program http://www.cipamericas.org

Translation: Jenny Marie Forsythe

Resources:
Carlos Santos, “¿Que protegen las áreas protegidas?”, Montevideo, Trilce, 2011.
Ciência & Saúde Coletiva, vol.12, Nº 1, Rio de Janeiro, enero-marzo de 2007.
Facultad de Ciencias Médicas-Universidad nacional de Córdoba, Informe 1º Encuentro Nacional de Médicos de Pueblos Fumigados, Córdoba, 2010.
Ignacio Cirio, Efectos Colaterales, Radio Mundo Real (www.radiomundoreal.fm/rmr).
Meyer, T. F.; Reswende, I.L.C.; Abre, J. C.; “Incidência de suicidios e uso de agrotóxivos por trabalhadores rurais em Luz (MG), Brasil”, Revista Brasileira de Saúde Ocupacional, Sâo Paulo, Nº 116, Vo. 32, pp. 24-30, 2007.
MST, “Balanço do ano velho e perspectivas para 2012”, en www.mst.org.br
Red Social de Justicia y Derechos Humanos, “Derechos Humanos en Brasil 2011”, Brasilia, 2011.

There are many kinds of war. The classic image of a uniformed soldier kissing mom good-bye to risk his life on the battlefield has changed dramatically. In today’s wars, it’s more likely that mom will be the one killed.

The UNDP states that by the mid-1990s, 90% of war casualties were civilians– mostly women and children.
Mexico’s drug war is a good example of the new wars on civilian populations that blur the lines between combatants and place entire societies in the line of fire. Of the more than 50,000 people killed in drug war-related violence, the vast majority are civilians. President Felipe Calderón claims that 90% of the victims were linked to drug cartels. But how does he know? In a country where only 2% of crimes are investigated, tried, and sentenced, the government pulled this figure out of its sleeve.

There is no official information on why these thousands were killed. When their bodies are found in unmarked mass graves, no one even knows who they were. With violence the norm, executions can —and do— target grassroots leaders, human rights defenders, indigenous peoples, and rebellious youth under the cloak of the drug war.

Not Just Homicide

There are also war tolls beyond the body counts. The homicide number misses the disappeared, the thousands whose bodies–dead or alive–are never found, never counted. And it hides the mutilation of lives caused by “collateral damage”: the loss of loved ones, families forced from their homes, permanent injury, orphans and widows, sexual abuse, lives lived in fear.

These costs fall primarily on the shoulders of women–the mothers, daughters, and sisters who are left with the nearly impossible task of seeking answers and redress in a justice system outpaced by violence and overrun by corruption. They are often re-victimized by government agencies that ignore, reject, or stifle their pleas for justice.

“Families that demand that our children be found face all kinds of threats… the loss of our property, isolation, rejection by our own families,” said Araceli Rodríguez, a mother whose son, a young policeman, was disappeared on the job. His police unit refuses to give information on his disappearance. “I wake up and find that it’s not a nightmare, that his absence is real and the impunity is also real.”

It’s rare to hear the voices of the women who bear the brunt of the drug war. Their pain doesn’t make headlines. Some need anonymity to remain alive. Many have been granted protective measures by the government or international human rights organizations because of the extreme threats they face.

Telling Stories

Despite all these difficulties, some 70 women told their stories amid tears and despite fear for their lives in Mexico City on January 22. The meeting called by the Nobel Women’s Initiative brought an international delegation led by Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams together with Mexican women victims of the violence and women human rights defenders.

From the sketchy statistics available, women make up a relatively small proportion of the murdered in Mexico, but they are the majority of citizens who denounce disappearances, murders, and human rights violations in the drug war. They work on the front lines of defending communities and human rights. For their efforts, they become targets themselves. In Mexico, six prominent women human rights defenders have been murdered in the past two years.

The last report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders recognized that threats and especially “explicit death threats against women human rights defenders are one of the main forms of violence in the region, with more than half coming from Latin America, most of those (27) from Mexico.”

Sometimes it’s the drug cartels that seek to silence women activists. But a recent survey of Mexican women human rights defenders revealed that they cite the government (national, state, and local) and its security forces as responsible in 55% of cases of violence and threats of violence to women defenders. Among government officials charged with public safety and justice, they encounter at best indifference and at worst death threats and attacks. A human rights defender from the state of Coahuila explained that searching for a disappeared loved one implies “always having to be in the hell of the institutions, which are often infiltrated by crime.”

Gender-based violence including femicide has skyrocketed in the context of the overall violence. The number of femicides in Chihuahua since sending the army in has risen to 837 for the period of 2008- June 2011 —nearly double the total femicides in 1993-2007. Women rights defenders report that the vast majority of threats and acts of violence against them include gender-based violence.

Silent No More

Olga Esparza, whose daughter Monica disappeared in Ciudad Juarez in 2009, explains through her tears that the government simply doesn’t care. “We’re the ones who have to carry out the investigations, with our own resources.” She adds that government officials often add insult to injury, “They say she’s probably just gone off with her boyfriend or she’s a prostitute or drug addict.” In her case, as with so many others, there’s no investigation, no results, no justice.

Another woman described how her work with indigenous communities led to her rape and torture by police agents. She continues to live in terror due to threats against her life and her family.

Alma Gomez of the Center for the Human Rights of Women in Chihuahua summed up what she sees in the center, “Women are the invisible victims, we are always at risk in this military and police occupation. We know of gang rapes by security forces that the women don’t even report; arbitrary arrests; women who make the rounds between army barracks and city morgues searching for their sons, fathers, or husbands. We are the spoils of war in a war we didn’t ask for and we don’t want.”

“Victim” is really the wrong word for these women. The mother whose son disappeared more than two years ago said, “In the struggle to find my son, I joined the peace movement. I learned that I can transform my pain into a collective force and together we can help more people to have a voice and to now be empowered to defend their rights.”

Valentina Rosendo, a Me’phaa indigenous woman from the State of Guerrero, was raped by soldiers and took her case all the way up to the Interamerican Court of Human Rights. She sums up the reason for participating in the Nobel Women’s forum, “It’s really hard to speak out, but it’s more painful to keep quiet.”

Laura Carlsen is the Director of the Americas Program and is currently corresponding from the Nobel Women’s Delegation as it tours Mexico, Honduras, and Guatemala.

Raúl Zibechi

Chilean students question the education system as commercial and elitist because it reproduces existing social inequities and makes them worse. But they are not just asking questions: They are practicing the kind of education they have spent years dreaming about and struggling to obtain.

“If workers can manage a factory, we can manage the school,” says Cristóbal, 17, as he flashes a smile. Cristóbal is a student at the Luis Galecio Corvera A-90 high school in the Santiago borough of San Miguel. The school is among the 200 in the city that students have occupied. But on September 26, they decided to follow the example of the workers of Cerámicas Zanón, the Argentine factory workers took over and began running 10 years ago.

“Things were getting complicated because the occupation was weakening,” Cristóbal says. “It was clear to us that it wasn’t enough to just criticize our education. We had to do something more, but we didn’t know where to start until we heard that the Zanón workers were giving a talk at the University of Chile. We went to listen to them and when we came back we started running the school ourselves.”

After the takeover, a majority of students—with the enthusiastic support of many parents—returned to school. Some of the teachers joined them. “When I saw that my children were getting up and going to school without having to wake them up, that they were excited about going, I understood that they were doing something important, something that adds up to a different kind of education,” says a mother at the basketball court, where the November sun shines brightly.

Non-teaching workers took refuge in a union resolution that authorizes them to not work without school management. “The unions don’t work if there’s no boss,” Cristóbal noted with irony, prompting bursts of laughter in the courtyard. In just a few months the secondary students have learned more than they did during years of monotonous classes. They take the initiative for their studies, propose topics, show up on time, and are delighted not to wear the government-mandated school uniform they call “penguin suits.”

The student conflict was a tremendous jolt to Chilean society, as reflected even by public opinion polls. When the newspaper La Nacion asked a group of poll takers to name the best thing about 2011, 63 percent answered the student and environment mobilizations, compared with just 17 percent who chose the University of Chile soccer team, which won the South American cup at the end of November. Just 3 percent chose the Cervantes Prize, the major Spanish-language literary prize, which was awarded to writer Nicanor Parra.

Chile’s most prominent intellectuals agreed with the editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, Victor Hugo de la Fuente, who wrote: “In five months of massive mobilizations, Chilean students have changed the face of the country.” “The Manifesto of Historians [a document designed to answer some of the basic questions about the protests and signed by some of the nation's leading intellectuals and academics],” goes even further, and maintains that “we are looking at a revolutionary, anti-neoliberal movement” that is restoring politics to civil society and re-knitting the strands of history which were interrupted by the 1973 coup.

A society in motion

Chile has not seen such a vast wave of protest since the 1980s and the massive mobilizations against the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. The year began with solid resistance in the south, around the city of Punto Arenas, and protests against increased gas prices. The movement was so strong that the government had to negotiate with the Citizens Assembly of Magallanes and eventually reversed the price hikes.

Then in May more than 30,000 people protested in Santiago against the HidroAysén project to build five mega dams in Patagonia (a project supported by both the government and the opposition) without consulting the public. Never before had an environmental action united so many people, an indication that change was underway.

Soon after, victims of the 2010 earthquake began to demonstrate. Most of them were still homeless, spending their second winter in highly precarious conditions. As they pointed out, highways used to transport goods had been repaired, but not the homes of the poor and working class.

At the end of April, students began to mobilize. On June 30, 200,000 marched along the Alameda, Santiago’s most important thoroughfare. From then on, there were dozens of marches. “Young people were moved by a festive spirit,” according to historian Mario Garcés. There were no political party banners or uniform signs. Above all, there were no marches to familiar state symbols—Congress and the President’s Office, the usual destinations for unions and political parties.

In the following weeks, students, especially high school students, occupied the television network Chilevision to protest coverage of the mobilizations. They also occupied political party headquarters, both the ultra-rightist UDI and the opposition Socialist Party.

The most important moment occurred on August 4th. Police repression was very strong and 874 students were detained. Throughout the country people responded to the students, with cacerolazos [beating pots and pans in protest] and massive, spontaneous demonstrations in the major cities—they even staged a national strike like they did against Pinochet. President Sebastian Piñera’s popularity had fallen to 22 percent by the end of September.

But what happened in the barrios on the night of August 4th is an indication of the true strength of the movement. Camila Silva, a member of Diatriba, a “militant pedagogy” collective, lives in a lower-middle-class barrio called La Florida. “When I went out to the first caceroleo with my compañero, there were 100 people. The next time, young people from the cultural center brought their batteries and an electric guitar, soccer fans came with their Colo Colo banners and there were groups with Mapuche flags, something that you only see when there is a big win in soccer.”

Camila highlights the enthusiasm of the crowd, the way neighbors–especially women–organized spontaneously. “That organization is like a community, and it wakes up your memory. People shouting, ‘And he’s going to fall!’–the same thing they shouted during the protests against Pinochet. There was dancing until two or three in the morning, on every street corner there was a group, throughout the barrio, in many barrios of Santiago.”

“The left thought that repression had destroyed these kinds of social ties. At a certain point those relationships became invisible, but when something really big happens, they resurface, because there is still a latent memory of them. And people help each other again. The same thing happened with earthquake,” adds Cristian Olivares, another student in the Diatriba collective.

On the outskirts of the city, men and women who hadn’t marched since the “return” of democracy in 1989 took to the streets again. And they did so in the ways that those who have little often do: singing, dancing, sharing food and drink and turning a protest into a party. In fact, this was a vast mobilization against social inequality in a country that the United Nations Development Programme says is among the 15 most unequal nations in the world.

Unequal Education

Ever since the neoliberal reforms of the Pinochet regime, education has been a commercial product. Contributions from students and their families finance 75 percent of the education system; just 25 percent comes from the state. At the university level, seventy percent of students take out loans and go into debt to finance their education.

Education is also highly segmented. According to Garcés, there is one system for the rich, another for the middle class, and a third for the poor. At the secondary level (high school), 7 percent attend private schools, which cost between 300 and 500 dollars a month. The middle class (about 50 percent of all secondary students), attend semi-private or government-subsidized schools operated with a voucher system. They pay a small amount (from 40 dollars a month), and financing is shared with the state. The poorest students attend “municipal schools,” which have few resources.

The semi-private sector is dominated by a group of small businessmen who profit from state vouchers. They are authorized to have up to 45 students in a classroom, while private schools cannot have more than 35. Forty percent of those who enroll in municipal or semi-private high schools cannot comprehend what they read; 70 percent do not score high enough on entrance exams to attend university.

At the university level, social inequality translates into indebtedness; there is no free, universal access to a university education. The deregulation of the system during the military dictatorship (1973 – 1980) also led to an increase in the number of private universities. There are now 60 private institutions, where the cost of a degree varies between $150 a month for social sciences and $1,200 a month for engineering or medicine. To finance their educations students have to obtain bank loans and go into debt.

Faced with this situation, students are proposing that natural resources are nationalized and used to finance public education. There is a precedent: Pinochet did not privatize the Chilean state copper company, Codelco, and by law part of its profits are used to finance the armed forces. Not surprisingly the student movement has support among the middle class, even in the some of the more well-to-do neighbors of Santiago.

Student control of schools

A half hour from Santiago, the borough of San Miguel reflects the various levels of “middle class”: from those who live in high-rises along broad avenues to those who live in precarious little houses. Formerly one of the largest boroughs of the city, its poorest barrios (such as La Victoria) have been torn away in an effort to turn San Miguel into a strictly middle class neighborhood. Nevertheless, it continues to be plagued with social contrasts.

Secondary School A-90 started the year with 179 students, but a decade ago there were 4,000. Students left to go to subsidized schools, which are reputed to offer a better education, although their evaluations suggest otherwise. The borough’s socialist mayor, Julio Palestro, is one of the mayors who have supported the privatization of education. In 2009 he closed a public school where 2,000 students were enrolled.

At the assembly in the gymnasium young people explain that their school ranks number 14 on the list for “academic risk.” Asked what that means, they smile: “It refers to the risk that we will become criminals.” Most of their parents work for little more than minimum wage (180,000 Chilean pesos, around $350), primarily as construction laborers.

Maybe that explains why the management is obsessed with discipline. “It’s as if we were locked up, this is practically a jail,” says Yergo, a third-year student. Camilo, a second-year student, is happy not having to wear a uniform. “It’s like a military doctrine, everyone with their crew cuts, their little ties, shirt tucked in. Don’t do this, don’t do that. And now [that the students run the school], you can just be who you are. You can just freely express yourself, you come here to be educated, not to be militarized.”

“The assembly is the control center,” Cristóbal explains. “All students participate and at times it’s open to teachers. We have watch duty and volunteers come in to make meals. Teachers teach, but they also learn from the students. At the beginning we had classes subject by subject, but later we saw that parceling out knowledge wasn’t the real way to learn, and we all got together for each subject. Some [students] explained to others, and the education became cooperative. That changes the way you relate to the subject and to the school.”

Just as workers who take over a factory change the way work is organized, students who took over their schools changed the “curricular boundaries.” Students need to know their rights, says Cristóbal, so they offer classes on the Constitution. “Philosophy, for example, lends itself to analyzing mobilizations and what is happening in the world; we begin to see that students work better if they are more interested.”

Juan Francisco, a philosophy teacher, agrees with his student. “All the student discussions have led them to reflect on the structure of power in Chile.” That’s why they analyze the constitution in his classes. Often they hold workshops, which furthers participation. Weekly assemblies have been incorporated into the curriculum.

The relationships between students and teachers have shifted. As hierarchies melted, relationships became more cooperative and supportive. In the classroom, they sit in a circle. The teacher is someone who helps, but is not above the rest. Eliana Lemus, a teacher of biology, chemistry, and physics, and principal of the school, maintains that discipline is much greater than it used to be, perhaps because it is not imposed and there is a desire to be together and share the experience.

One of the most notable accomplishments of the student movement is the effect it has had on the barrios, where it has increased social organization. At public school A-90, the parents association now supports the student takeover and control of the school. Cacerolazos in San Miguel led to “territorial assemblies,” where neighbors go to discuss problems in the barrio, as well as general problems such as education. Similar groups have been reported in other Santiago barrios, with up to 200 neighbors in attendance.

But not everything has been positive. Several teachers say they have been threatened and beaten by colleagues who do not agree with the takeover. The socialist mayor, a strong opponent of the movement, beat up Cristóbal Espinoza, a student and spokesman for A-90.

The future of those without a future

The 2011 student movement is the third such movement Chile has experienced in the last decade. In 2000 secondary students took to the streets to demand transportation, in what was called the “mochilazo” or the “backpackers’ movement.” In 2006 there were large demonstrations and schools were occupied, leading to the resignation of the Minister of Education and a partial modification of the education law.

The “Penguin Revolution,” named for the official school uniform of the protesting junior high students, was the first successful movement of the democracy. It was as massive as it was innovative; decisions were made in assemblies, with direct participation and a lack of hierarchy. But for Mario Garcés, “the 2006 secondary school movement was co-opted or trapped in the halls of La Moneda [the seat of the national government] and fell through institutional cracks.” President Michelle Bachelet created a commission of experts, with little student participation. They drafted a new law, but, nevertheless, did not remove the profit motive from the educational system.

This time around, however, the movement is not limited to students, nor is it exclusively focused on education. Chile is going through a crisis of legitimacy brought on by the inability of the political system inherited from the dictatorship to meet social demands. As the “Manifesto of Historians” points out, society is debating again, questioning top-down authority and enacting “forms of direct and decentralized democracy.”

This “politics of the streets” shows a “vocation for power” that questions the way the transition to democracy has taken place, a transition “alienated from social movements,” according to Garcés. Not only are people returning to the streets, they are also doing another kind of politics, broadening the movement, reaching out to the poor in ways that the movement in 2006 did not.

Finally, new practices form new people. Marcela Moya, an English teacher at A-90, points out, “the articulate fluidity the students have when they speak out, their self-discipline.” This is a personal evolution that is not all about the individual, but instead is collective and political. That suggests changes that are far more profound than what we see on the surface: “This movement has given rise to individuals who I know are going to be 100 percent committed to the society of the future, because they themselves have made that future possible.”

Raúl Zibechi is an international analyst for Brecha of Montevideo, Uruguay, lecturer and researcher on social movements at the Multiversidad Franciscana de América Latina, and adviser to several social groups. He is a columnist and also writes the monthly “Zibechi Report” for the Americas Program.

Translation: Barbara Belejack

Resources

Diatriba, revista de pedagogía militante, No. 1, November 2011.

Entrevistas a estudiantes del liceo A-90, Santiago, November 30, 2011.

Entrevista al Colectivo Diatriba, Santiago, 30, 1 de diciembre de 2011.

Mario Garcés, “El movimiento estudiantil y la crisis de legitimidad de la política chilena”, LOM, Santiago, July 2011.

“Otro Chile es posible”, Le Monde Diplomatique, Santiago, 2011.

“Trazas de utopía. La experiencia autogestionaria de cuatro liceos chilenos durante
2011”, OPECH/Colectivo Diatriba/Quimantú, Santiago, 2011.

The Americas Program has signed the pronouncement against death threats to social and human rights organizations in Barrancabermeja, Colombia. We fully support the pronouncement and encourage others to do so as well. We have had the opportunity to familiarize ourselves with the brave work of these organizations as part of the International Pre-Electoral Mission in February of 2010 (see more information here). We’ve included pictures from our visit with the group “Quinto Mandamiento (Fifth Commandment)” that illustrate their approach to standing up to violence with peace and respect, culture and hope. We ask that our esteemed readers support this pronouncement by sending the signatures of organizations of which they are a part to salvamigo@hotmail.com, quintomandamiento@gmail.com or ocnoviolento@hotmail.com. The serious danger posed to these human rights groups remains grave.

DECLARATION ON THE DEATH THREATS RECEIVED BY GRASSROOTS ORGANIZATIONS AND HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS IN BARRANCABERMEJA, MAGDALENA MEDIO, COLOMBIA.

Mr. JUAN MANUEL SANTOS
President, Republic of Colombia.

Mr. President:

On November 26, 2011, the criminal group linked to drug trafficking know as “Los Rastrojos” left a pamphlet at the home of a member of the Unión Sindical Obrera (USO) that orders organizations in defense of human rights in the city of Barrancabermeja, Colombia to desist in their “activities of charity, marches, events, etc.”, in order to avoid death, as a result of being declared “military targets”. The organizations threatened include: Regional Corporation for the Defense of Human Rights (Corporación Regional para la Defensa de los Derechos Humanos-CREDHOS), USO, Popular Feminine Organization (Organización Femenina Popular), People in Action (Gente en Acción), Human Rights Workers Forum of Barrancabermeja (Espacio de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras de Derechos Humanos de Barrancabermeja), Fifth Commandment Collective (Colectivo Quinto Mandamiento), David Ravelo Crespo Foundation (Fundación DRC), Workers Union of Gas Providers-SINTRAINQUIGAS, and the National Association of Solidarity Support (Asociación Nacional de Ayuda Solidaria–ANDAS). This clear threat also seeks to stigmatize the important work of these organizations by calling them “guerrillas disguised as sheep”, “terrorists” and “Organizations of Faggots” (showing their homophobia and intolerance for the free development of the personality).

For decades, grassroots organizations that work for the defense, protection and promotion of human rights in the region of Magdalena Medio have been the target of threats and forced disappearances, in the midst of a climate of impunity and the absence of justice for the victims.

In this case, organized crime groups with paramilitary origins again have intimidated organizations with long experience and wide recognition for their work in defense of human rights, but this time they have also harassed and threatened new leaderships, like the Fifth Commandment Collective, which promotes active conscientious objection to all forms of violence through the rejection of all forms of recruitment. The organization builds solidarity, citizen participation and defense of human rights through educational projects, tolerance and community work to overcome fear.

Some members of the Fifth Commandment Collective have been the objects of threats, and suffered stigmatization and intimidation by illegal groups. Dagoberto Portillo and John Velásquez have received threats when they promoted marches to defend the free development of the personality and encouraged grassroots organization. In both cases, the authorities have made no progress in the investigations and have belittled the seriousness of the situation due to the humble origins of the victims. They have even put forth hypotheses that is just “common crime” or disputes between bands of delinquents. This is a form of double victimization–first by organized crime, and then by government authorities themselves.

Another recent case was the breaking and entering in the home of Juan Carlos Gálvis Gálvis of the National Union of Food Industry Workers (SINALTRAINAL) by armed men who wrote threats on the walls of his home, and threatened and intimidated his wife and small daughter at gunpoint.

This new threat sent in the pamphlet goes beyond the Fifth Commandment Collective and the other grassroots human rights organizations mentioned above. Conscious as we are of the important work that the organizations that were threatened are carrying out in the region of Magdalena Medio, and of the terrible power of organized crime to destabilize through fear and intimidate society from being able to fully exercise its rights, the organizations signed on below respectfully and urgently request the Colombian government headed by President Juan Manuel Santos, Vice President Angelino Garzón, and Interior and Justice Minister Germán Vargas Lleras, to take the following actions to guarantee the lives and work of these organizations and their members:

1. Declare publicly and through the media the importance of the work carried out by these civil society organizations and human rights defenders for democracy and human rights in Colombia, as did the mayor of the city of Barrancabermeja. This action is aimed at combating rumors and the stigmatization of their activities, which is harmful to their already complicated work and puts their lives on the line. It is very important to point out that any act of intimidation, stigmatization or violent act against these organizations constitutes a crime that will be sanctioned by the Colombian authorities.

2. Vigorously prosecute criminal organizations that intimidate and impede the full exercise of human rights and strictly sanction those implied in these acts to set an example and to fight impunity and the absence of credibility in the administration of justice in Colombia. We recommend that the Human Rights Unit of the General Prosecutors Office of the Nation move forward in the investigation of each case, without minimizing their seriousness.

3. Announce a meeting and study of the situation, preferably with the participation of the victims, high-level officials such as Vice President Angelino Garzón and Minister of the Interior and Justice Germán Vargas Lleras, as well as the Public Ministry led by the Attorney General’s Office, to formulate specific actions of risk analysis and effective protection of the persons and organizations threatened.

4. We request that work be carried out in coordination with other entities in Colombia, such as the Popular Defense office, local authorities (the Barrancabermeja mayor’s office and other municipal offices), and security forces (police, army, justice officials, investigative teams) to formulate specific actions to protect those threatened and capture and subsequently bring to trial the delinquents.

We will be awaiting the measures taken by the Colombian government to guarantee protection of the persons and organizations that defend human rights in Magdalena Medio since, as we have pointed out, their work is crucial in a region historically marked by violence, intolerance, and persecution by criminal and paramilitary organizations operating outside the law.

Sincerely,

SIGNING ORGANIZATIONS:

The CIP Americas Program (México)

Washington Office on Latin America – WOLA (USA)

Global Exchange (USA)

Fellowship of Reconciliation (USA)

Presbyterian Peace Fellowship (USA)

Ontario Public Service Employees Union – OPSEU (Canada)

Christian Peacemaker Teams Colombia (USA – Canada)

CoDevelopment (Canada)

Common Frontiers (Canada)

Projet accompagnement solidarité Colombie (Canada)

Canadian Union of Public Employees (Canada)

Center for International Policy Latin America Rights & Security Program (USA)

This pronouncement is also available in Spanish

Copies:
Vice – President, Mr. Angelino Garzón.
Minister of Interior and Justice, Mr. Germán Vargas Lleras.
General Prosecutor of Colombia, Mrs. Viviane Morales.
General Attorney of Colombia, Mr. Alejandro Ordoñez.

Street Performance by Quinto Mandamineto: Just another murder down by the river

John Velásquez in the garden of Quinto Mandamiento

Quinto Mandamiento, Barrancabermeja

By William D. Hartung

The Obama administration’s defense strategy review, unveiled at the Pentagon on January 6th, is already under attack. Republican front-runner Mitt Romney has argued that the plan is naïve and dangerous. Independent experts such as Russell Rumbaugh of the Washington, DC-based Stimson Center have criticized the plan for being too timid in its pursuit of Pentagon spending reductions. A point that has not received adequate attention is the fact that the modest reductions contained in the Obama plan would still leave the United States military with unparalleled global reach at time when traditional military threats are rapidly receding.

There are a number of potentially positive elements in the Obama plan, but they are offset by calls for new commitments that will still leave the United States on a permanent war footing. The positive elements of the plan include a pledge to avoid fighting large-scale wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan; to increase reliance on diplomacy and development assistance; and to make the health of the United States economy the administration’s number one national security priority. If faithfully executed, these changes would justify reductions in U.S. military spending well beyond what the Obama administration has proposed so far. They would also set the stage for a less interventionary foreign policy.
Unfortunately, the encouraging parts of the Obama approach are counter-balanced by an expansion of U.S. military commitments that are more appropriate for a policy of global hegemony than they are for a policy of genuine defense.
For example, talk of reducing U.S. troop numbers in Europe has been matched with an increased military commitment to Asia, including a new Marine base in Australia; a large-scale naval presence in the Pacific and Indian oceans; and new arms sales to Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and other U.S. allies in the region. All of these efforts are aimed at “containing” China’s military.

Perhaps the most threatening development from China’s perspective involves U.S. plans to ring China with a missile defense system that, in theory, could blunt China’s ability to respond to a U.S. nuclear attack. Whether or not such a system would work, it will raise anxieties in China, whose nuclear arsenal of a few hundred long-range missiles is dwarfed by the thousands of strategic nuclear warheads that the United States possesses.

In the Middle East, the reduction of U.S. combat forces in Iraq will still leave a residual force of about 16,000, including uniformed military personnel, CIA operatives, and private military contractors. The United States will also be strengthening its network of military bases in the region. Last but not least, Washington is concluding record arms deals to the Middle East and Persian Gulf, including a record $60 billion deal for advanced combat aircraft, attack helicopters, guns and bombs to Saudi Arabia. Each new arms deal will involve dispatching U.S. troops and private contractors to help the recipient nation operate and maintain its U.S.-supplied weaponry.

And contrary to the implication that the new strategy could lead to “neglect” of U.S. military commitments in Africa and Latin America, there is a possibility that U.S. military activity in these regions could even increase from current levels. During the announcement of the new Obama defense strategy, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta spoke of using “innovative means” to maintain a military presence in these two regions. The methods mentioned included increased rotation of U.S. troops through each area, more exercises with local military forces, and an increase in arms transfers and military training.

Africa offers a clear example of the new military approach in action. In the past two years the United States has intervened repeatedly in Africa, from its role in the coalition that overthrew the government of Libyan dictator Muammar Ghadafi, to the dispatch of military personnel to Uganda and South Sudan, to the use of drones and U.S.-armed allies (such as Kenya) to intervene in the civil war in Somalia. Add to this the role of private contractors like Dyncorps in training African military forces, and the outlines of U.S. interventionary capacity in Africa become apparent. Nothing in the new Obama strategy would preclude engaging in or expanding similar activities in the future.

In Latin America, the primary form of U.S. military involvement in recent years has been the supply of arms and military training through a variety of programs, many of which on first glance do not appear to be military in nature. According to the “Just the Facts” data base maintained by the Center for International Policy, the Latin America Working Group, and the Washington Office on Latin America, U.S. military and police aid to Latin America and the Caribbean will total nearly $1 billion for Fiscal Year 2012. Total military and police aid to the region since 2007 exceeds $7.5 billion. In 2010 alone, U.S. arms sales to the region totaled another $1.7 billion. Add to this the deployments of U.S. troops to the region under the umbrella of counter-drug and humanitarian activities, and the U.S. military presence in Latin America is substantial. There is no indication that the new Obama administration strategy would change any of this. If anything, some elements, such as troop rotations and military exercises, could increase.

The bottom line of the new U.S. strategy, as pronounced by U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, is that the United States still wants to be prepared to fight and defeat any enemy, anywhere. The question that has not been answered in Washington, or even asked in the Congress or mainstream political circles, is whether the Obama approach is a strategy in search of enemies to justify it, rather than a disciplined approach to defending the United States from genuine threats. The most obvious challenges to U.S. security, from cyber attacks to nuclear proliferation, do not have military solutions. And potential future challenges like the “Chinese threat” are better dealt with through political and economic cooperation than by military buildups and saber rattling.

The “new” Obama strategy is not nearly new enough. True change will only come when U.S. leaders abandon the outmoded notion that the United States should be prepared to go anywhere and fight any battle in the name of “policing the globe.”

William Hartung is the director of the Common Defense Campaign: Arms and Security Project at the Center for International Policy. He has also been the director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation as well as the director of the Arms Trade Resource Center at the World Policy Institute. Bill Hartung’s latest book is Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the Making of the Military-Industrial Complex (Nation Books, 2011). He has been published and featured in The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Nation, The World Policy Journal, CBS 60 Minutes, NBC Nightly News, and is a columnist for the Americas Program.

By David Bacon

Editor’s Note: This is the third and final installment of a three-part series on migrant rights by journalist and immigration activist David Bacon. This article is taken from the report “Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized – Fighting for the Rights of Migrants in the United States” that examines the origins of the current migratory labor phenomenon, the mechanisms that maintain it, and proposals for a more equitable system. The Americas Program is proud to publish this series in collaboration with the author.

Development of the Immigrant Rights Movement to 1986

Before the cold war, the defense of the rights of immigrants in the U.S., especially those from Mexico, Central America and Asia was mounted mostly by immigrant working class communities, and the alliances they built with the left wing of the U.S. labor movement. At the time when the left came under attack and was partly destroyed in the cold war, immigrant rights leaders were also targeted for deportation. Meanwhile, U.S. immigration policy became more overtly a labor supply scheme than at any other time in its history.

In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, the combination of enforcement and contract labor reached a peak. In 1954 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 Mexicans were brought into the U.S. each year on temporary work visas, in what was known as the “bracero” program. The program, begun during World War Two, in 1942, was finally abolished in 1964.

The civil rights movement ended the bracero program, and created an alternative to the deportation regime. Chicano activists of the 1960s – Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chávez, Bert Corona, Dolores Huerta and others – convinced Congress in 1964 to repeal Public Law 78, the law authorizing the bracero program. Farm workers went on strike the year after in Delano, California, and the United Farm Workers was born. They also helped to convince Congress in 1965 to pass immigration legislation that established new pathways for legal immigration – the family preference system. People could reunite their families in the U.S. Migrants received permanent residency visas, allowing them to live normal lives, and enjoy basic human and labor rights. Essentially, a family- and community-oriented system replaced the old labor supply/deportation program.

Then, under pressure from employers in the late 1970s, Congress began to debate the bills that eventually resulted in the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. That debate set in place the basic dividing line in the modern immigrant rights movement. IRCA contained three elements. It reinstituted a bracero-like guest worker program, by setting up the H2-A visa category. It penalized employers who hired undocumented workers (“employer sanctions”), and required them to check the immigration status of every worker. And it set up an amnesty process for undocumented workers in the country before 1982.

The main trade union federation to which most U.S. unions belong, the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), supported sanctions, saying they’d stop undocumented immigration (and therefore, presumably, job competition with citizen or legal resident workers). The Catholic Church and other Washington DC liberal advocates supported amnesty and were willing to agree to guest workers and enforcement as a tradeoff. Employers wanted guest worker programs. The bill was opposed by immigrant communities and leftwing immigrant rights advocates, from the Centro de Acción Social Autónomo (CASA), founded in Los Angeles by labor and immigrant rights leader Bert Corona, to the Bay Area Committee Against Simpson Mazzoli in Northern California, and similar groups around the country. Local labor activists and leaders also opposed the bill, but were not strong enough to change labor’s position nationally. The Washington DC-based coalition produced the votes in Congress, and Ronald Reagan, one of the country’s most conservative presidents, signed the bill into law.

Once the bill had passed, many of the local organizations that had opposed it set up community-based coalitions to deal with the bill’s impact. In Los Angeles, with the country’s largest concentration of undocumented Mexican and Central American workers, pro-immigrant labor activists set up centers to help people apply for amnesty. That effort, together with earlier, mostly left-led campaigns to organize undocumented workers, built the base for the later upsurge of immigrants that changed the politics and labor movement of the city. Elsewhere, local immigrant advocates set up coalitions to look for ways to defend undocumented workers against the impact of employer sanctions. Grass roots coalitions then began helping workers set up centers for day laborers, garment workers, domestic workers, and other groups of immigrants generally ignored by established unions.

The Movement since IRCA

Over the 27 years since IRCA, a general division has marked the U.S. immigrant rights movement. On one side are well-financed advocacy organizations in Washington DC, with links to the Democratic Party and large corporations. They formulate and negotiate over immigration reform proposals that combine labor supply programs and increased enforcement against the undocumented. On the other side are organizations based in immigrant communities, and among labor and political activists, who defend undocumented migrants, and who resist proposals for greater enforcement and labor programs with diminished rights.

In the late 1990s, when the Clinton administration acquiesced in efforts to pass repressive immigration legislation (what eventually became the Immigration Reform And Immigrant Responsibility Act), Washington lobbying groups advocated a strategy to allow measures directed at increasing deportations of the undocumented to pass (calling them “unstoppable”) while mounting a defense only of legal resident immigrants. Many community-based coalitions withdrew from the Washington lobbying efforts, refusing to cast the undocumented to the wolves. The strategy failed, in any case, and the eventual law includes severe provisions directed at legal, as well as undocumented immigrants.

In the labor movement, the growing strength of immigrant workers, combined with a commitment to organize those industries where they were concentrated, created the base for changing labor’s position. At the 1999 AFL-CIO convention in Los Angeles, the federation called for the repeal of employer sanctions, for a new amnesty, and for defending the labor rights of all workers. The federation was already opposed to guest worker programs. That position was maintained by the AFL-CIO, even after several unions left to form the rival Change to Win federation, until 2009. At that time, a compromise was reached between the two federations, in which they dropped their previous opposition to employer sanctions, so long as they were implemented “fairly.”

In the years between 2003 and 2009, a succession of “comprehensive” immigration reform bills were introduced into Congress. At their heart are the guest worker programs proposed by employers. But while the employer lobbies wrote the first bills, they’ve been supported by a political coalition that includes some unions, beltway immigrant advocacy groups, and some churches. Except for the vacillating and divided position of unions, this is the same political coalition that passed IRCA in 1986.

Some local immigrant rights coalitions have also supported the bills, although most have been unwilling to agree to guest worker programs and more enforcement. Supporters of the comprehensive bills have organized a succession of high-profile lobbying efforts, which received extensive foundation support. The structure of the bills has been basically the same from the beginning – the same three-part structure of IRCA – guest workers, enforcement and some degree of legalization.

Over the last decade, however, a loose, unorganized network of groups has grown that has generally opposed most CIR bills and their provisions, and that have also organized the movements on the ground that have opposed increased enforcement and repression directed against immigrant communities. Outside the Washington beltway, community coalitions, labor and immigrant rights groups are advocating alternatives. Some of them are large-scale counters to the entire CIR framework. Others seek to win legal status for a part of the undocumented population, as a step towards larger change.

The DREAM Act

One of those proposals is the Dream Act. First introduced in 2003, the bill would allow undocumented students graduating from a U.S. high school to apply for permanent residence if they complete two years of college or serve two years in the U.S. military. Estimates are that it would enable over 800,000 young people to gain legal status, and eventual citizenship. For seven years thousands of young “sin papeles,” or people without papers, have marched, sat-in, written letters and mastered every civil rights tactic to get their bill onto the Washington DC agenda.

Many of them have “come out” — declaring openly their lack of legal immigration status in media interviews, defying authorities to detain them. Three were arrested when they sat-in at the office of Arizona Senator John McCain, demanding that he support the bill, while defying immigration authorities to come get them. The DREAM Act campaigners did more than get a vote in Washington. They learned to stop deportations in an era when more people have been deported than ever since the days of the Cold War.

When it was originally written, the bill would have allowed young people to qualify for legalization with 900 hours of community service, as an alternative to attending college, which many can’t afford. However, when the bill was introduced, the Pentagon pressured to substitute military for community service. Many young activists were torn by this provision, and ultimately, the bill did not pass Congress, even with that change. Nevertheless, many immigrant rights activists view the DREAM Act as an important step towards a more basic reform of the country’s immigration laws.

Supporting the Dream Act and other partial protections for the undocumented are the worker centers around the country. This movement is based on organizing centers for contingent workers, who are mostly undocumented. Some of the centers have anchored the protests against repression in Arizona, or fought to pass laws in California, New York and elsewhere prohibiting police from turning over people to immigration agents. They’ve especially developed grassroots models for organizing migrants who get jobs on street corners, and these projects have come together in the National Day Labor Organizing Network. The National Domestic Worker Alliance was organized last year, in part using the experience of day labor organizing, to win rights for domestic workers, almost all of whom are women. It won passage of a bill of rights in New York, and is working on passing it in California.

On a broader scale, what would be a law that would liberate people- not turn them into modern day slaves- today? Many progressive immigrant rights organizations have sought to formulate an answer to this question, especially in response to the CIR proposals in Washington that they oppose.

Advocating New Policies- Progressive Proposals

The Frente Indigena de Organizaciones Binacionales (Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations – FIOB) conducted a series of organized discussions among its California chapters to formulate a very progressive position on immigration reform, with the unique perspective of an organization of migrants and migrant-sending communities. Because of its indigenous membership, FIOB campaigns for the rights of migrants in the U.S. — for immigration amnesty and legalization for undocumented migrants — while also condemning proposals for guest worker programs. At the same time, “we need development that makes migration a choice rather than a necessity — the right to not migrate,” explains Gaspar Rivera Salgado, FIOB’s binational coordinator. “Both rights are part of the same solution. We have to change the debate from one in which immigration is presented as a problem to a debate over rights. The real problem is exploitation.” This perspective is especially important in the U.S., where those debating immigration policy need to hear the voices of Mexicans, especially on the left, as they discuss the movement of people back and forth across the border.

The FIOB proposal on immigration reform is similar to that advanced by the Dignity Campaign, a loose coalition of organizations around the country that have proposed an alternative to the comprehensive (labor supply plus enforcement) bills. The constituent organizations have participated in other earlier coalitions opposing employer sanctions and guest worker programs. The Dignity Campaign brings together immigrant rights and fair trade organizations, to encourage each to see the global connections between trade policy, displacement and migration. It also brings together unions and immigrant rights organizations to spur the growth of a fight back against immigration enforcement against workers, highlighting the need to oppose the criminalization of work.

The Dignity Campaign proposal draws on previous proposals, particularly one put forward by the American Friends Service Committee called “A New Path,” — a set of moral principles for changing U.S. immigration policy. Several other efforts were also made earlier by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights to define an alternative program and bring together groups around the country to support it. Important contributions to the Dignity Campaign were made by many other organizations, listed on its website, www.dignitycampaign.org.

The critique shared by all these organizations contends that the CIR framework ignores trade agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA, which produce profits for U.S. corporations, but increase poverty in Mexico and Central America. Without changing U.S. trade policy and ending structural adjustment programs and neoliberal economic reforms, millions of displaced people will continue to come, no matter how many walls are built on the border.

Under the “comprehensive immigration reform” (CIR) proposals promoted by Washington DC advocacy groups for several years, some of which were introduced as bills into Congress, people working without papers would continue to be fired and even imprisoned and raids would increase. Vulnerability makes it harder for people to defend their rights, organize unions and raise wages. That keeps the price of immigrant labor low. This will not stop people from coming to the U.S., but it will produce a much larger detention system. Last year over 350,000 people went through privately-run prisons for undocumented immigrants. At the same time, the Washington DC-based CIR proposals all expand guest worker programs, in which workers would have few rights, and no leverage to organize for better conditions. Finally, the CIR legalization measures would impose barriers making ineligible many of the 12 million people who need legal status. They condition legalization on “securing the border,” which has become a Washington DC euphemism for a heavy military presence augmenting 20,000 Border Patrol agents, creating a climate of wholesale denial of civil and human rights in border communities.

“The governments of both Mexico and the U.S. are dependent on the cheap labor of Mexicans. They don’t say so openly, but they are,” Rufino Domínguez concludes. “What would improve our situation is legal status for the people already here, and greater availability of visas based on family reunification. Legalization and more visas would resolve a lot of problems – not all, but it would be a big step,” he says. “Walls won’t stop migration, but decent wages and investing money in creating jobs in our countries of origin would decrease the pressure forcing us to leave home. Penalizing us by making it illegal for us to work won’t stop migration, since it doesn’t deal with why people come.”

Changing corporate trade policy and stopping neoliberal reforms is as central to immigration reform as gaining legal status for undocumented immigrants. It makes no sense to promote more free trade agreements, and then condemn the migration of the people they displace. Instead, Congress must end the use of the free trade system as a mechanism for producing displaced workers. That also means delinking immigration status and employment. If employers are allowed to recruit contract labor abroad, and those workers can only stay if they are continuously employed, then they will never have enforceable rights.

The root problem with migration in the global economy is that it’s forced migration. A coalition for reform should fight for the right of people to choose when and how to migrate. Freedom of movement is a human right. Even in a more just world, migration will continue, because families and communities are now connected over thousands of miles and many borders. Immigration policy should therefore make movement easier.

At the same time, workers need basic rights, regardless of immigration status. It would be better to devote more resources to enforcing labor standards for all workers, instead of penalizing undocumented workers for working, and employers for hiring them. “Otherwise,” Domínguez says, “wages will be depressed in a race to the bottom, since if one employer has an advantage, others will seek the same thing.”

To raise the low price of immigrant labor, immigrant workers have to be able to organize. Permanent legal status makes it easier to organize. Guest worker programs, employer sanctions, enforcement and raids make organizing much more difficult. Today the section of workers with no benefits and the lowest wages is expanding the fastest. Proposals to deny people rights or benefits because of immigration status make this process move even faster. A popular coalition should push back in the other direction, toward more equal status, which will help unite diverse communities.

Building a political coalition for a more pro-worker and pro-immigrant reform has to start by seeking mutual interest among workers. That common ground is a struggle for jobs and rights for everyone. Black unemployment, for instance, is at catastrophic levels. Very little unemployment is a result of displacement by immigrants, and is caused mostly by the decline in manufacturing and cuts in public employment. In the 2001 recession 300,000 out of 2,000,000 Black factory workers lost their jobs. But in the growing service and high tech industries, displaced African American and Chicano workers are anathema. Employers think they’re too pro-union. They demand high wages the companies don’t want to pay.

It’s not possible to win major changes in immigration policy without making them part of a struggle for the goals of African Americans, unions and working-class communities. To end job competition, for instance, workers need Congress to adopt a full-employment policy. To gain organizing rights for immigrants, all workers need the Employee Free Choice Act and labor law reform. Winning those demands requires an alliance between workers – immigrants and native-born, Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans and whites. An alliance with employers, giving them new guest worker programs, will increase job competition, push wages down, and make affirmative action impossible.

The Dignity Campaign proposal, therefore, is not just an alternative program for changing laws and policies, but an implicit strategy of alliances among those communities and constituencies based on their mutual interest. The basic elements of such an alternative include:

* Giving permanent residence visas, or green cards, to undocumented people already here, and expanding the number of green cards available for new migrants.
* Eliminating the years-long backlog in processing family reunification visas, strengthening families and communities.
* Allowing people to apply for green cards, in the future, after they’ve been living in the U.S. for a few years.
* Ending the enforcement that has led to thousands of deportations and firings
* Repealing employer sanctions, and enforcing labor rights and worker protection laws, for all workers.
* Ending all guest worker programs
* Dismantling the border wall and demilitarizing the border, so more people don’t die crossing it, and restoring civil and human rights in border communities.
* Responding to recession and foreclosures with jobs programs to guarantee income, and remove the fear of job competition
* Redirecting the money spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to rebuilding communities, refinancing mortgages, and restoring the social services needed by working families.
* Renegotiating existing trade agreements to eliminate causes of displacement and prohibiting new trade agreements that displace people or lower living standards, including military intervention intended to enforce neoliberal reforms.
* Prohibiting local law enforcement agencies from enforcing immigration law, ending roadblocks, immigration raids and sweeps, and closing detention centers

There is no shortage of needed work in the U.S., but budget priorities must be changed to redirect resources to the areas that will produce jobs and increased well-being. To resolve the dilemmas of migration and globalization, the U.S. needs a system that produces security, not insecurity. Corporations and those who benefit from current priorities might not support this alternative, but millions of people will.

A new era of rights and equality for migrants won’t begin from Washington DC, any more than the civil rights movement did. A human rights reform will be a product of the social movements of this country, especially of people on the bottom outside the beltway. A social movement made possible advances in 1965 that were called unrealistic and politically impossible a decade earlier. The Dignity Campaign proposal may not be a viable one in a Congress dominated by Tea Party nativists and corporations seeking guest worker programs. But just as it took a civil rights movement to pass the Voting Rights Act, any basic change to establish the rights of immigrants will also require a social upheaval and a fundamental realignment of power.

David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He has been a reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years, shooting for many national publications. He has exhibited his work nationally, and in Mexico, the UK and Germany. Bacon covers issues of labor, immigration and international politics and is an associate editor at Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to the Americas Program.

The report “Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized – Fighting for the Rights of Migrants in the United States” was prepared for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a three-part series on migrant rights by journalist and immigration activist David Bacon. This article is taken from the report “Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized – Fighting for the Rights of Migrants in the United States” that examines the origins of the current migratory labor phenomenon, the mechanisms that maintain it, and proposals for a more equitable system. The Americas Program is proud to publish this series in collaboration with the author.

Over the last 25 years, guest worker programs have increasingly become a vehicle for channeling the migration that has stemmed from free market reforms. Increasing numbers of guest workers are recruited each year for labor in the U.S. from Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean under the H1-B, H2-A and H2-B programs. Recruiters promise high wages and charge thousands of dollars for visas, fees and transportation. By the time they leave home, the debts of guest workers are crushing.

In 2007 the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report, Close to Slavery, documenting the treatment of guest workers. No one gets overtime, regardless of the law. Companies charge for tools, food and housing. Guest workers are routinely cheated. Recent protests have exposed the exploitation of guest workers recruited from India to work in the Mississippi shipyard of Signal International. They paid $15-20,000 for each visa, lived in barracks in the yard, and had to get up at 3.30 to use the bathroom because there weren’t enough for everyone. The company cut the wages, held six workers prisoner for deportation, and fired their leader, Joseph Jacobs. In 2006 Santiago Rafael Cruz, an organizer for the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, was murdered when the union tried to set up an office in Mexico to end the corruption and abuse by guest worker contractors.

If workers protest this treatment, they’re put on a blacklist and won’t be hired the following year. Protesting wouldn’t do much good anyway. Prior to the current administration, the U.S. Department of Labor almost never decertified a guest worker contractor, no matter how many complaints were filed against it. The paper industry depends on this system. Twenty years ago, it stopped hiring unemployed workers domestically, and began recruiting guest workers. As a result, labor costs in the forests have remained flat, while paper profits have gone up.

U.S. guest worker programs in general are just one part of a much larger, global system, which produces labor and then puts it to use. In Latin America, economic reforms promoted by the U.S. government through trade agreements and international financial institutions displace workers, from miners to coffee pickers. They then join a huge flood of labor moving north. When they arrive in the U.S., they become an indispensable part of the workforce, whether they are undocumented or laboring under work visas. Displacement creates a mobile workforce, an army of available workers that has become an indispensable part of the U.S. economy, and that of wealthy countries like it. The same system that produces migration needs and uses that labor.

The creation of a vulnerable workforce through the displacement of communities is not new. Africa became “a warren for the hunting of black skins” during the bloody displacement of communities by the slave traders. Uprooted African farmers were transported to the Americas in chains, where they became an enslaved plantation workforce from Colombia and Brazil to the U.S. South. Their labor created the wealth that made economic growth possible in the U.S. and much of Latin America and the Caribbean. But displacement and enslavement produced more than wealth. As slave-owners sought to differentiate slaves from free people, they created the first racial categories. Society was divided into those with greater and fewer rights, using skin color and origin. When anti-immigrant ideologues call modern migrants “illegals,” they use a category inherited and developed from slavery.

Today displacement and inequality are as deeply ingrained in the free market economy as they were during the slave trade. Mexican President Felipe Calderon said during a 2008 visit to California, “You have two economies. One economy is intensive in capital, which is the American economy. One economy is intensive in labor, which is the Mexican economy. We are two complementary economies, and that phenomenon is impossible to stop.” When Calderon says intensive in labor, he means that millions of Mexican citizens are being displaced, and that the country’s economy can’t produce employment for them. To Calderon and employers on both sides of the U.S./Mexico border, migration is therefore a labor supply system.

U.S. immigration policy determines the rules under which that labor is put to use. Employers see migrants as a source of labor, and seek to organize the flow of migration, to direct it where it’s needed. “The economic interests of the overwhelming majority of [U.S.] employers favor borders as porous for labor as possible,” according to Faux. But employers want labor in a vulnerable, second-class status, at a price they want to pay.

President George Bush said the purpose of U.S. immigration policy should be to “connect willing employers and willing employees.” He was simply restating what has been true throughout U.S. history. Providing labor is the reason Chinese migrants were brought from the Pearl River delta to build the transcontinental railroad in the 1850s. Providing labor was the motivation for the slave trade. In the 1920s and 30s Filipinos were kept moving from labor camp to labor camp, while anti-miscegenation laws kept them from settling down and forming families. They, too, provided labor, as did those Mexican farmers brought to the U.S. during the bracero contract labor program, from 1942 to 1964.

U.S., industrial agriculture has always depended on a migrant workforce, formed from waves of Chinese, Japanese, Filipinos, Mexicans, and more recently, Central Americans. Today a growing percentage of farm workers are indigenous people speaking languages other than Spanish, an indication that economic dislocation has reached far into the most remote parts of Mexico’s countryside.

Within this system of displacement and migration, U.S. immigration policy determines the status of migrant labor. It doesn’t stop people from coming into the country, nor is it intended to. Its main function is to determine the status of people once they’re here. And an immigration policy based on providing a labor supply produces two effects. Displacement becomes an unspoken tool for producing workers, while inequality becomes official policy. The unquestioned assumption is that migrants will not have the same rights as people living in the community around them. All the immigration bills debated by Congress over the last few years are based on this assumption.

Today, calling someone an “illegal” doesn’t refer to an illegal act. Illegality is a social category. Illegality creates an inexpensive system. So-called illegal workers produce wealth, but receive a smaller share in return – a source of profit for those who employ them. Inequality is profitable. In 1994 the labor of undocumented workers pumped $45,000 per person into the California economy according to the North American Integration and Development Center at UCLA. Assuming almost all were working at close to the minimum wage, each received only a small part of the value he or she produced, about $8840 each. The average manufacturing wage at the time produced an annual income more than twice that. That additional value was expropriated by employers.

Companies depend, not just on the workers in the factories and fields, but also on the communities from which they come. If those communities stop sending workers, the labor supply dries up. Work stops. Yet no company pays for a single school or clinic, or even any taxes, in those communities. Workers pay for it all, through the money they send home.

About 11 percent of Mexico’s population lives in the U.S., according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Their remittances, which were less than $4 billion in 1994 when NAFTA took effect, rose to $10 billion in 2002, and then $20 billion three years later, according to the Bank of Mexico. In 2006 that figure reached $25 billion. At the same time, the public funds which used to pay for schools and public works leaves Mexico in debt payments to foreign banks. Remittances, as large as they are, cannot make up for this outflow. According to a report to the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, remittances accounted for an average of 1.19% of the gross domestic product between1996 and 2000, and 2.14% between 2001 and 2006. Debt payments accounted for 3% annually. By partially meeting unmet, and unfunded, social needs, remittances are indirectly subsidizing banks.

At the same time, companies dependent on this immigrant stream gain greater flexibility in adjusting for the highs and lows of market demand. The global production system has grown very flexible in accommodating economic booms and busts. Its employment system is based on the use of contractors, which is replacing the system in which workers were directly employed by the businesses using their labor. This has been the employment model in the garment and janitorial industries and in agriculture for decades. Displaced migrant workers are the backbone of this system. Its guiding principle is that immigration policy and enforcement should direct immigrants to industries when their labor is needed, and remove them when it’s not.

Guest worker and employment-based visa programs were created to accommodate labor needs. When demand is high, employers recruit workers. When demand falls, those workers not only have to leave their jobs, but the country entirely.

Today employers call for relaxing the requirements on guest worker visas, especially since those protections have recently been strengthened by the current Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis. Simply putting more labor protections on the programs does not change their basic structure that makes those workers vulnerable. “They don’t have labor rights or benefits,” charges Rufino Domínguez, the former coordinator of the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations, who now heads the Oaxacan Institute for Attention to Migrants. “It’s like slavery. If workers don’t get paid or they’re cheated, they can’t do anything.”

Labor Programs and Greater Enforcement – The Corporate Agenda on Immigration

The meatpacking industry started lobbying for guest workers in the late 1990s, when companies organized the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition – corporations like Wal-Mart, Marriott, Tyson Foods and the Associated Builders and Contractors. While Republicans are strong guest worker supporters, the proposals in Congress are bipartisan, supported by liberals like Senator Edward Kennedy and Congressman Luis Gutierrez.

New guest worker programs are the heart of the corporate program for immigration reform, and are combined with proposals for increased enforcement and a pro-employer program for legalization of the undocumented. Guest worker proposals, advanced now even at the negotiations of the World Trade Organization, have two characteristics. They allow employers to recruit labor in one country and put it to use in another, and they tie the ability of workers to stay in their new country to their employment status. If they aren’t working, they have no right to stay. These inevitably lead to a different social, political and economic status, in which workers don’t have the same rights as those around them, and can’t receive the same social benefits.

Some bills in the U.S. Congress in recent years would have allowed some of the largest corporations to recruit and bring into the country, through labor contractors, as many as 800,000 people a year. And in the middle of the final debate in 2006 in which his proposal failed, President George Bush tried to eliminate all family-based immigration, and allow people to come to the U.S. only when recruited by employers. Under his proposal almost all immigrants would have become guest workers. Significantly, however, the general three-part approach of the Obama administration’s immigration reform program is not significantly different from that of his predecessor.

A second element in the corporate program is legalization, but in a program tailored more to protect employers from legal charges for hiring undocumented workers than helping families adjust their status. Congress’ comprehensive bills all would have imposed waiting periods from 11 to 18 years on immigrants applying for legalization, during which time they would be as vulnerable as ever. But their employers would be protected from charges they’d violated employer sanctions, while they organized the recruitment of new workers through guest worker programs.

Because of the record of abuse of guest worker programs, and because working outside those programs offers an attractive alternative, the third necessary element of this kind of corporate reform in an increase in enforcement against undocumented labor in the workplace, and unauthorized border crossing. These proposals seek to end spontaneous migration, in which people decide for themselves when to come and where to go, by making it impossible to work without a work visa and contract. In its place they substitute a regimented system in which people can only migrate as contracted labor.

After the big immigrant rights marches of 2006 the Federal government launched a dramatic increase in raids in workplaces and communities. Spokespeople for the bureau of Customs and Immigration Enforcement (ICE), a division of the Federal Department of Homeland Security (DHS), explained they were intended to show the need for the administration’s immigration program. ICE also began to implement many of the enforcement measures contained in the reform bills Congress didn’t pass.

In 2007 then-Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff proposed a rule requiring employers to fire any worker who couldn’t correct a mismatch between the Social Security number they’ provided their employer, and the SSA database. The regulation assumes those workers have no valid immigration visa. That regulation was challenged in federal court by unions and immigrant advocates. But the Obama administration has simply implemented the same scheme using different tactics.

Recently the Council on Foreign Relations proposed two goals for U.S. immigration policy. In a report from the CFR-sponsored Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy, CFR Senior Fellow Edward Alden stated, “We should reform the legal immigration system,” it advocated, “so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances U.S. competitiveness.” This essentially calls for continuing use of migration to supply labor at competitive, or low, wages. “We should restore the integrity of immigration laws,” Aiden went on to say, “through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system.” This couples an enforcement regime like the one at present, with its raids and firings, to that labor supply scheme.

For two years dozens of other employers have fired workers in response to demands from ICE, the enforcement arm of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE chief John Morton made serial announcements of the number of companies being audited to find undocumented employees – citing figures from 1000 to 1654. Many thousands of workers have lost their jobs. In Minneapolis, Seattle and San Francisco over 1800 janitors, members of SEIU union locals, lost their jobs. In 2009 some 2000 young women laboring at the sewing machines of American Apparel were fired in Los Angeles. At one point Morton claimed ICE had audited over 2900 companies.

President Obama says this workplace enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages—and oftentimes mistreat those workers.” An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claims “unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.” Curing intolerable conditions by firing workers who endure them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however. Instead, the administration’s rhetoric has fed efforts to blame immigrants for “stealing jobs” and for undermining wages.

The DHS workplace enforcement wave is focusing, not on low-wage employers, but on high-wage, and often unionized ones. There is a long history of anti-union animus among immigration authorities. Agents have set up roadblocks before union elections in California fields, conducted raids during meatpacking organizing drives in North Carolina and Iowa, audited janitorial employers and airline food plants prior to union contract negotiations, and helped companies terminate close to a thousand apple packers when they tried to join the Teamsters Union in Washington state.

Unscrupulous employers use their vulnerability to deny undocumented workers the minimum wage or overtime, and to fire workers when they protest or organize. This affects workers in general. After deporting over 1000 employees of Swift meatpacking plants, former Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff called for linking “effective interior enforcement and a temporary-worker program.’’ The government is again giving a cheap labor subsidy to large employers. Deportations, firings and guest worker programs all make labor cheaper and union organizing harder.

Meanwhile, some states and local communities, seeing a green light from the Department of Homeland Security, have passed measures that go even further. The Arizona legislature has passed a law requiring employers to verify the immigration status of every worker through a federal database called E-Verify, and fire workers whose names get flagged. It then passed a law, SB 1070, requiring police to check the immigration status of all people they stop on the street. Mississippi passed a bill making it a felony for an undocumented worker to hold a job, with jail time of 1-10 years, fines of up to $10,000 and no bail for anyone arrested. States like Georgia and Alabama have passed bills even more repressive than Arizona’s. Congress itself has passed bills requiring similar use of the E-Verify database, which were supported by both political parties.

Workplace raids and firings are part of an overall program for increasing immigration enforcement. One of its most bitterly-fought elements is the growing connection between police departments and immigration authorities. Under President Bush, the federal government began implementing “287g” agreements, under which local police departments shared information and turned over to immigration agents people arrested for even minor traffic violations. Those agreements then were codified in a federal program called “Secure Communities.” At first, ICE tried to sign agreements with state and local law enforcement bodies, requiring them to turn over the fingerprints of anyone with whom they came into contact. The Obama administration claimed that it was only seeking criminals for deportation.

In practice, however, this increased cooperation led to the detention of hundreds of thousands of immigrants with no criminal record, who were held simply because they were undocumented. Deportations skyrocketed. Over a million people have been deported from the U.S. as a result of all this combined enforcement since Obama took office. When even some states tried to pull out of the program, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it didn’t need their agreement, and would continue expanding the program with or without them. A rising wave of protest has met this declaration, as the wave of deportations has grown. In response to criticism, the administration has called for the passage of “comprehensive immigration reform” as its alternative to criminalization and mass removals – essentially using blackmail and repression to advance the corporate immigration reform program.

David Bacon is a writer and photojournalist based in Oakland and Berkeley, California. He has been a reporter and documentary photographer for 18 years, shooting for many national publications. He has exhibited his work nationally, and in Mexico, the UK and Germany. Bacon covers issues of labor, immigration and international politics and is an associate editor at Pacific News Service and a regular contributor to the Americas Program.

The report “Displaced, Unequal and Criminalized – Fighting for the Rights of Migrants in the United States” was prepared for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.