Chernobyl and the Fire Next Time

John LaForge

The April 26, 1986 Chernobyl disaster is being remembered, unhappily, the world over. In Germany, 29 years after the fact, the ancient custom of wild boar hunting is still prohibited because the animals remain too contaminated with Chernobyl’s long-lived radioactivity.

Government warnings of Chernobyl’s cancer-causing fallout are nearly forgotten today, but a May 14, 1986 bulletin from the EPA said, “[A]irborne radioactivity from the Chernobyl nuclear accident is now so widespread that it is likely to fall to the ground wherever it rains in the United States.”

On May 22, 1986, Minnesotans read, “For the second time since the [Chernobyl disaster] last month, a slightly elevated level of radioactive iodine has been found in a Minnesota milk sample, state health officials said. … The amount of iodine-131 in the air also increased slightly [May 19] after several days of decline, health officials said.” (“Slight rise in radioactivity found again in state milk,” Duluth News-Tribune & Herald)

The Associated Press reported May 15, 1986, “State authorities in Oregon have warned residents dependent solely on rainwater for drinking that they should arrange other supplies for the time being.” Likewise, regarding the triple reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, Forbes.com reported on April 11, 2011: “Radiation from Japan has been detected in drinking water in 13 more American cities, and cesium-137 has been found in American milk — in Montpelier, Vermont — for the first time since the Japan nuclear disaster began, according to data released by the EPA late Friday [April 8].”

Contamination Still Blowing in the Wind

Chernobyl exploded and burned out of control for weeks. The French Nuclear Energy Agency’s “2002 Update of Chernobyl,” noted, “[C]ontinuing low-level releases occurred … for up to 40 days after the accident, particularly on 15 and 16 May, attributable to continuing outbreaks of fires or to hot areas in the reactor.…”

Demonstrating nuclear power’s capacity for whole-earth poisoning, the catastrophic consequences are still spreading 3 decades later.

The dispersion of large amounts of radioactive cesium-137 — which persists in the environment for at least 300 years — was especially concentrated in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia where half the spewed radiation fell; the other half spread to every country in the Northern Hemisphere. The American Geophysical Union reported in 2009 that radioactive cesium-137 dispersed by Chernobyl wouldn’t “disappear” from the environment through decay for up to 320 years.

Cesium has heavily contaminated forested areas of Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone, some 1,000 square miles surrounding the reactor where access and habitation are severely limited. When the forests catch fire, radioactive materials including cesium are again dispersed to the winds.

For two months in the summer of 2010, wildfires in Russia burned over 2 million acres and caused at least 50 deaths. The August 10, 2010 New York Times noted that “dozens of fires have been burning in contaminated zones.” Two days later, the AP and the Agency France Presse cited government reports that at least six wildfires had been extinguished “this week” in the heavily-contaminated Bryansk region.

Time magazine later reported about the 2010 wildfires that Russian leaders had removed maps of likely radiation-contaminated fires from web sites maintained by the national forestry agency. (Taking a lesson from the Russians, the US government halted its emergency water and air radiation monitoring on the West Coast two months after the start of Fukushima’s three explosions and meltdowns.)

In 2002, dozens of peat fires and wildfires again spread across heavily-contaminated Belarus. The AP reported July 22, 2002 that “Belarusian Emergency Minister Valery Astapov said radiation levels in the fire zone are elevated…”

The Washington Post and AP reported in April 1996 that a wildfire had “spread quickly through five villages in the exclusion zone, carried by strong winds blowing toward Kiev and its 2.6 million residents. It burned pines and buildings in one of the areas most heavily contaminated with radioactive cesium.”

The latest news of cesium spreading from Chernobyl comes from a team of researchers led by Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina. Forest covered 50% the exclusion zone before the 1986, but trees and brush now cover 70% of the area. Mousseau’s team reports that as climate change heats and dries the region, wildfires are expected to rage more often and more fiercely.

According to Dr. Mousseau’s report, published in Ecological Monographs, wildfires that burned in the exclusion zone in 2002, 2008 and 2010 have together redistributed approximately 8% of the original amount of cesium-137 released by the 1986 disaster, with world worst accidental airborne release. The researchers warned that large blazes in the future could spread significant amounts of radioactive soot across Europe, leading to contamination of food crops.

Asked by the New York Times April 6 what the consequences might be, Dr. Mousseau was circumspect and grim. “There is never a positive consequence of having increased amounts of mutagenic materials in our environment,” he said, “It’s always negative.”

Seeking Justice for Human Rights Crimes in Egypt

Marjorie Cohn

On July 3, 2013, the Egyptian military staged a coup’etat and deposed the democratically elected government of President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. Thousands of Egyptians staged demonstrations throughout Egypt to show support for Morsi.

One month later, the Egyptian army and police carried out several massacres in Cairo, killing hundreds of unarmed protesters. Authorities mounted a military response to largely peaceful protests by supporters of the Brotherhood against the illegitimate Egyptian government. Although aimed primarily at the Brotherhood, the crackdown included other political opposition groups and individuals.

Four Dutch citizens of Egyptian origin, who were present during three of the most brutal massacres in summer 2013, filed a petition in the Netherlands that charged Egyptian Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim with crimes against humanity. In September 2014, the Dutch law firm of Seebregts & Saey submitted a formal request to the Dutch prosecutor to prosecute Ibrahim. Dutch criminal courts have jurisdiction under the International Crimes Act when a Dutch national has been the victim of a crime. Due to head of state immunity, the lawsuit did not name Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who ordered the Rab’a massacre when he was Defense Minister.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) undertook a one-year investigation into the conduct of security forces responding to the demonstrations. In its report titled “All According to Plan: The Rab’a Massacre and Mass Killings of Protesters in Egypt,” HRW concluded, “police and army forces systematically and intentionally used excessive lethal force in their policing, resulting in killings of protesters on a scale unprecedented in Egypt.” HRW also determined “the killings not only constituted serious violations of international human rights law, but likely amounted to crimes against humanity, given both their widespread and systematic nature and the evidence suggesting the killings were part of a policy to attack unarmed persons on political grounds.” Although HRW was able to confirm that some protesters used firearms in a few instances, they did not justify “the grossly disproportionate and premeditated lethal attacks on overwhelmingly peaceful protesters.”

The Rab’a Massacre

There were over 20,000 protesters in Rab’a Square. In what HRW called “the gravest incident of mass protester killings,” Egyptian police, snipers and military personnel opened fire on unarmed demonstrators on August 14, 2013, “killing at least 817 and likely more than 1,000.” Security forces used live ammunition “with hundreds killed by bullets to their heads, necks, and chests.” Snipers fired from helicopters overRab’a Square.

“Much of the shooting by police appears to have been indiscriminate,” HRW found, “openly firing in the general direction of crowds of demonstrators instead of targeting armed protester gunmen who may have posed a serious threat.”

The Rab’a mosque, which served as a refuge, particularly for women and children, “held so many corpses that it felt like it ‘had turned into a cemetery,’” one protester told HRW. An 18-year-old boy came into the hospital and said his stomach hurt. A doctor noted, “I looked down and his intestines were all out. He had taken several bullets and [later] died.” The doctor also reported that another person “took a bullet in the face, causing his face to open and tongue to fall out . . . He spent 40 minutes looking at me and gesturing for help, but I couldn’t do anything. Surgery was not possible.”

The deaths “amounted to collective punishment of the overwhelming majority of peaceful protesters,” HRW concluded.

One of the petitioners, who was present at the demonstration, was not wounded but people on his left and right were being shot. He was also present when the authorities set fire to the hospital on Rab’a Square, killing about 300 patients who were not able to leave.

Republican Guard Square

On July 7, 2013, about 2,000 Brotherhood supporters began a peaceful sit-in. Shortly before dawn on July 8, police and army units opened fire, targeting those in the protest and others emerging from prayers at the mosque. Authorities killed 61 protesters with live ammunition and injured 435. Most suffered gunshots to the head, neck and chest.

One of the petitioners was hit by a bullet, but survived.

Manassa Memorial

At least 95 protesters were killed on July 27, 2013. A field hospital doctor reported, “From 2 a.m. until 8:30 a.m. it was a steady stream; the bodies kept coming. Most had gunshot wounds in the head, neck or chest. The hospital was overflowing; we were completely over capacity.” Another field house doctor told HRW: “All of the dead were either dead on arrival or died immediately after they arrived, because of where they were hit; if you’re hit in the head or chest, you won’t last very long. The entire hospital floor was covered with injured people. It was beyond imagination.”

The two petitioners who were present at this demonstration were not wounded but were in danger of being hit. Others a short distance away were hit by bullets.

Crimes Against Humanity

Dutch law provides for sentences up to life in prison for convictions of crimes against humanity. The crime is defined as intentional killing or other inhumane acts of a comparable nature which intentionally cause severe suffering or severe physical or psychological damage, when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population pursuant to State policy.

HRW found that “security forces systematically and deliberately killed largely unarmed protesters on political grounds . . . in a widespread manner, resulting in the deaths of over 1,150 protesters, in July and August of 2013.”

HRW further concluded, “[t]he manner in which security forces used force to disperse protests appears to reflect policies set by the Egyptian government.” In fact, “the government anticipated and planned for the deaths of several thousand protesters.”

The Rab’a massacre was “executed pursuant to a plan formulated by the Interior Ministry and approved by the Cabinet and National Defense Council after three weeks of preparation,” HRW determined, citing statements of Ibrahim that he anticipated the dispersal would kill large numbers of demonstrators.

Ibrahim made public statements revealing he knew beforehand that many people would die during the police and military actions to end the demonstrations. The day after the Rab’a massacre, Ibrahim said “the dispersal plan succeeded 100 percent,” indicating that it adhered to a plan that had been put in place.

In a televised interview on August 31, 2013, Ibrahim confirmed that the Interior Ministry expected losses of “10 percent of the people,” adding, “you will find thousands lost from their side.”

“Abject politicization of justice’

HRW learned that “[s]ecurity forces detained over 800 protesters on August 14, 2013, some of whom they beat, tortured and in some cases summarily executed.”

On April 11, 2015, 51 Brotherhood supporters were convicted in a mass trial, based on the testimony of a single police officer. HRW said the evidence presented at the trial demonstrated that the men were disseminating news about and organizing peaceful protests in opposition to the military coup and removal of Morsi. Fourteen of the defendants were sentenced to death and the other 37 were given life sentences. According to Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director of HRW, “The fact that people who covered and publicized the mass killings in 2013 could go to prison for life or be executed while the killers walk free captures the abject politicization of justice in Egypt.”

Morsi was convicted of charges including incitement to violence and torture from 2012 demonstrations that resulted in the deaths of 10 people outside the presidential palace. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison.

The Dutch lawsuit

The case against Ibrahim is under consideration by the Dutch prosecutor’s office. Should the prosecutor refuse to prosecute Ibrahim, the petitioners can request that the superior court in The Hague order the prosecutor to prosecute.

There has been no legal accountability for the massacres conducted by the Egyptian military government against the largely peaceful protesters. If high government officials in Egypt are permitted to commit crimes against humanity with impunity, it will encourage similar actions in the future – both in Egypt and elsewhere. Since there is little prospect for justice in Egypt itself, the Dutch lawsuit may be the only vehicle for accountability for these most serious crimes.

Rebellious Politics and Civil Society

Michael Welton

On the tip of everyone’s tongue

The discourse of “civil society” had almost disappeared from our political vocabularies for much of the 20^th century. But almost overnight, it seemed, civil society was on the tip of everyone’s tongue. Those of us in the West watched with amazement, tears of joy and surprise as the “power of the human spirit” confronted state power in country after country….Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, East Germany, the former Soviet Union and Tiananmen Square. Vaclav Havel’s assumption of the presidency of Czechoslovakia on 29 December, 1989, heralded the “velvet revolution.” In this miraculous year we watched rulers lose their nerve and people gain strength to organize and assert themselves against the state. Two years later in 1991, the Soviet Union monolith disintegrated. In Eric Hobsbawm’s dramatic turn of phrase, the twentieth century came to an end.

The Polish rebellion can be accurately characterized as “civil society against the state.” One of Solidarity’s leading intellectuals, Adam Michnik, argued that one could neither execute a revolution from below nor reform communism from above. The learning challenge the Poles confronted was precisely how one could foster the self-organization of social life in the face of totalitarian rule. For Michnik, the challenge was to create many different kinds of independent, self-governing associations alongside the institutional framework of the state apparatus. The Polish leaders assumed that their own people would be able to find the courage and stamina to press their aims, and that their rulers would not use terror to repress them. These assumptions, of course, beg the question of just what kind of enabling conditions must be in place for there to be breathing and learning spaces within the suffocating air of the authoritarian regime. The answers are no doubt complex, and in Poland have much to do with the strength of the Roman Catholic Church.

The strength of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland lay, in part, in its deep identification with the Polish nation. Although its relationship with power was ambiguous, it had maintained its hold on the working class. This kept alive the values of religious and cultural freedom, and provided critical support for Solidarity and other flourishing associations of civil society. Perhaps nothing symbolizes the grip of the Church on the Poles more than Pope John II (Karol Wojtyla, former Archbishop of Krakow)’s triumphal June, 1979 tour through Poland. “The future of Poland,” he declared from the pulpit of his old cathedral, “will depend on how many people are mature enough to be non-conformists.” After his tour, thousands of Poles acquired a new self-respect and renewed faith.

In Poland people had to build consciously and actively what Cohen and Arato in their huge book, Civil Society and Political Theory (1992) called a “self-organizing society aimed not a social revolution but at structural reform achieved as a result of organized pressure from below.” Whether or not civil society was reborn in Poland, it was certainly created in the 1970s—scores of intellectual groups organizing petitions, publishing samizdat leaflets, periodicals, books, holding seminars—all of this the stuff of radical democratic adult education. Jacek Kuron, another of Solidarity’s leading intellectuals, wrote of the “self-limiting revolution” whose goal was the “constitution from below of a highly articulated, organized, autonomous, and mobilizable civil society” (Cohen and Arato). This social learning process never occurs in a historical vacuum. Solidarity was trying to constitute civil society in a context of unreformed, but somewhat unvigilant party-state and a raging economic crisis. Industrial workers had demonstrated their capacity for self-organization in the serious strikes of 1971 and 1976. The Polish peasantry had escaped the complete collectivization of agriculture; this gave them some autonomy.

These days the Left is rather jaundiced about the velvet revolution and the buoyant air has been squeezed out of the Arab Spring hot balloon. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there were many debates about the way forward in the Eastern European context. Pressure from below was to be organized as open and public; it was to be non-conspiratorial and non-avant-garde. In September 1979 the underground newspaper,Robotnik, published an entire issue on a “Charter of Workers’ Rights.” It was signed by sixty-five activists—workers, technicians, engineers, intellectuals. All gave their full addresses, and those who had phones, their numbers. They believed that pressure from below could force the existing system to adhere to its own legality as well as to de facto toleration of the plurality constituted by social movements.

They imagined, too, that they could bypass the state altogether by setting up parallel institutions (in particular, a critical public sphere). And legality, plurality and publicity were not viewed instrumentally, but as ends in themselves. But there is, no matter how precisely and carefully intellectuals analyze the forces operative in the conflictual field, always the question of risk. Between the “organization of enlightenment” and the “organization of action” lies a kind of Pascalian wager—a “leap of faith” into the never completely fathomable political waters. How does one really know where the loopholes of the regime are? How does one know whether they will come for you in the dark of the night? Will they open fire on us on our marches on the public square? Can one really avoid political party formation and engagement?

Carving public space out of totalitarian rock

It is no easy task to imagine how “public space” can be carved out of totalitarian rock. A public sphere of civil society is an “arena of deliberative exchange in which rational-critical arguments rather than mere inherited ideas or personal statuses could determine agreements and actions” (Craig Calhoun, “Civil society and the public sphere,”Public Culture, 5, 1993). A rational, dynamic public sphere requires relatively free and uncoerced structures that enable men and women to coordinate their actions self-consciously in dialogue with respected others. There must be structures of public discussion and political influence present within civil society.

In his startling text, “The power of the powerless,” Vaclav Havel writes of the “devastated sense of civic awareness” in the Soviet bloc
countries. There could be no better example of this devastated sense of civic awareness than in Romania. Like their dissident counterparts in Czechoslovakia, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria, Romanian intellectuals comprising the Group for Social Dialogue entered into the critical discourse of civil society. In late December, 1989, crushed for too long, squeezed like bugs between the fingers, Romanians overthrew the dreaded Ceausescus to the chants of “liberty” and “democracy.” The editorial board of the critical weekly journal 22 exclaimed: “The revolution was not completed simply with the flight and execution of the ex-presedential couple. There remains in their wake an entire bureaucratic apparatus, a destroyed economy, and especially a diseased mentality: one used to self-suppression, to enslavement, to asking for another’s permission” (italics mine.).

Few spaces were safe for free speech in the old Romania. Parks became the safest places because it was not easy to eavesdrop. Public life under Ceausescu was highly ritualized. He determined the standards of the art and media. He puffed his “glorious achievements.” When he travelled by motorcade through the streets of Bucharest, people were not allowed to hang their laundry for fear of a hidden sniper. People used the city streets to simply get somewhere, and the bustling market streets of the old Bucharest were only fond memories. But after December 22, 1989, the streets were alive again and people began to speak more openly in the coffee houses. The recovery of public life planted seeds to develop civil society’s potential and create the beginnings of a democratic public sphere.

Euphoric moments release energy and we walk with a new spring in our step. I was a bit taken aback when I read the opening lines from Manuel Castells’ book, Networks of Outrage and Hope (on social movements in the network age [2012]): “No one expected it. In a world darkened by economic distress, political cynicism, cultural emptiness and personal hopelessness, it just happened. Suddenly dictatorships could be overthrown with the bare hands of the people, even if their hands had been bloodied by the sacrifice of the fallen.” Well, we are now drinking the bitter dregs of the disintegrated Arab Spring. History is full of surprising moments when revolutionary possibility breaks through cement roadways and radical new directions (or political imaginaries) are opened up. But Castells’ statement is an ecstatic utterance of the hopeful moment. Later on, we can find ourselves sitting at 3 a.m. in the bar, empty glasses and cigarette butts strewn about, wondering where the party went.

In times when the ice melts from history’s window, however, we do see something of what is possible when we stop being afraid. To reclaim a public voice, people must speak out. They cannot look down at their feet and shuffle them, standing mute before power’s impervious face. Romanians began to shout slogans, generally in the form of rhymed couplets, at their despised rulers. Gail Kligman (“Reclaiming the public sphere: a reflection on civil society in Romania,” Eastern European Politics and Societies, 4(3), 1990) says that a “veritable chorus of vocalized dissent shattered the silence of the years,” an angry counter-punch to the monological double-speak of the party-state. Romanians wanted a free press, rule by law, revitalized academic studies and freedom of religious expression. None of this came easy (now we know more clearly the names of the devils who wanted to betray this awakening of the people).

The politics of human freedom and dignity

I would like to look briefly at the model of politics of those who flew the banner of “civil society against the state.” In a remarkable book, Arendt, Camus, and the Modern Rebellion (1992), Jeffrey Isaac saw striking similarities between the politics of Arendt and Camus and thinkers like Vaclav Havel, Adam Michnik and George Konrad. Havel speaks of a “new model of behavior” and insists that people not get “involved in diffuse general ideological polemics with the center, to whom numerous concrete causes are always being sacrificed; fight “only” for those concrete causes, and be prepared to fight for them unswervingly, to the end.” Havel described this model of conduct as deeply moral. Rather than confronting the state directly, one seeks to create “an island of freedom in an ocean of something that thought of itself as immensely free but in fact was not” (Disturbing the Peace[1986]). Like Camus, Havel does not place his faith in history, progress or humanity-in-the-abstract. But he insists that “even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time gain in political significance.”

Isaac thinks that this existential commitment to the spiritual-moral power of the person is “insistently rebellious.” The powerless have more power than they ever imagine. Moral acts of the person may reach beyond the isolated self, resonating deeply with those who are oppressed. Oppressive conditions never totally exhaust us. We always possess the capacity to “resist indignity and reconstitute community that can never be written off nor saddled by a political ideology” (Isaac).

In his famous “Letter to Dr. Gustav Husak” (written in 1975), Havel counselled the Czech dictator: “Life may be subjected to a prolonged and thorough process of violation, enfeeblement and anesthesia. Yet, in the end, it cannot be permanently halted….If life cannot be destroyed for good, neither, then can history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudoevents, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and start to crack” (Living in Truth [1986]).

Camus thought that the acceptance of the status quo froze history into an “absolute utopia.” Nor does Havel imagine that we have arrived at history’s end, with nothing left to do but mop up and tinker with market capitalism. To the contrary, human freedom—like Habermas’s communicative reason—is history’s stubborn presence. It is capable of manifesting itself in surprizing ways and in the most intractable of circumstances. In “The power of the powerless,” Havel applauds a rebelliousness residing in a “hidden sphere…where the human predisposition to communication exists.” This capacity for rebelliousness is inherent in all human interaction where we seek not power over or the instrumental use of the other, but simply to understand and express. Rebelliousness, for Havel, appears to be an attribute of social being itself. This theme—the recalcitrance of human freedom—can also be found in George Konrad’s Anti-Politics (1984) who appeals to the “authority of the spirit” against the dead conformism of state obedience. And Adam Michnik states that “solidarity provides a shelter for spiritual homelessness; it is the declaration of war against human solitude in the face of the communist Leviathan” (Letters from Prison [1985]).

For Isaac, then, the politics of civil society in Eastern and Central Europe exemplified an appealing vision of rebellious politics. Animated by the ideals of human dignity, solidarity and self-determination—and rebelling against the demoralizing experience of totalitarianism—these democrats attempted to co-ordinate means and ends. They sought to create islands of freedom amid the calcified structures of authoritarian communism. They called themselves “Dialogue,” “Civic Forum,” “Solidarity,” and “Democratic Forum” and, in so doing, embodied the “solidarity of chains” of which Camus once spoke. Isaac thinks that they were pioneering navigators, sailing between the “jagged edges of the frozen geopolitics of the Cold War, creatively pursuing a third way between capitalism and communism.”

Thus: one deep and profound lesson from sober reflection on the euphoria of the velvet revolution is that there are always “unanticipated and unthought possibilities latent within the present” (Isaac)—new spaces of freedom that breach the logic of ritualized, conventional party politics and manipulated public opinion. Yet, now twenty-five years after Havel’s assumption of the Czech presidency, Wolfgang Streeck’s sobering thought that: “More than ever, economic power seems to have become political power, while citizens appear to be almost entirely stripped of their democratic defences and their capacity to impress upon the political economy contents and demands that are incommensurable with those of capital owners” (“The crises of democratic capitalism,”New Left Review, 71, Sept-October 2011) calls forth once again the spiritual-moral power of persons everywhere (perhaps as never before). In songster Leonard Cohen’s inimitable words, “Ring the bells that still can ring….There is a crack in everything/That’s how the light gets in.”

The European Migration Crisis

Curtis Doebbler

There is no denying that many Europeans believe they are undergoing a migration crisis. Indeed, tens of thousands of Africans and Middle Easterners have fled their regions seeking more secure futures in Europe. Even though a good proportion of them never made it to Europe instead drowning in the Mediterranean Sea in no insignificant part due to European sea safety budget cuts, they keep coming.

It is easy to see how Europeans are scared. Europe has to date accepted a fraction of the refugees fleeing Africa and the Middle East. Many times more, the lion’s share of migrants, have fled to countries that are closer to home in the Middle East and Africa.

In Africa, South Africa and Sudan, host hundreds of thousands of economic and political refugees from surrounding countries like Zimbabwe, Angola, Eritrea, and Ethiopia, just to name a few neighbours. In the Middle East, Lebanon, Tunisia, and Turkey, host hundreds of thousands of refugees from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

For these African and Middle East countries huge influxes of refugees are not the exception, but the norm in recent years. At the same time, but the countries in Africa and Middle East receive little assistance from Europe or the United States to deal with the huge migrant influxes with which they are regularly faced.

Why should African and the Middle East countries expect support? Why should Europeans not be so surprised that they are receiving so many migrants fleeing death and destruction or exploitation at home? The answer lies in understanding the cause of the so-called ‘European migration crisis’.

In almost every case, the African and Middle East migrants are fleeing wars, violence, or exploitation caused by Europeans, Americans and their allies.

The United States’ initiated wars against the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, which are sustained with NATO and sometimes regional allied support, are responsible for a recently estimated slaughter of as many as four million people since they started. In addition, there are countless maimed and wounded civilians crowding hospitals around the region.

The so-called ‘evil regimes’ in these countries could not have killed and maimed as many people as the United States, NATO, and its allies killed in a hundred years. Nevertheless, the lesson from this senseless bloodshed has not been learned.

Instead of recognizing the erred ways of their violent actions these same countries have been involved in new acts of aggression against the people of Syria, Libya, and once again Iraq. It is not by coincidence that Syria, Libya, and Iraq were once the most developed countries in the Middle East and North Africa. They not only provided their own people free and high level health care and education, they drew migrant workers from around Africa, the Middle East and further abroad.

The migrant workers who came to Syria, Libya, and Iraq were not basket cases who had lost everything and who are often too traumatized to be able to contribute to society in which they eventually land after fleeing. The migrants that came to Syria, Libya, and Iraq were often workers, skilled and unskilled that contributed to society. They helped to build the societies in which they worked and their remittances back home often sustained their families and helped their own national economies.

Libya was the richest country in Africa and on-track to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Syria was a centre of Arab and Islamic learning where more books were translated into Arabic from other languages than anywhere else in the world. And Iraq had been on the verge of becoming an industrialised developed country with under-one and under-five child mortality rates that rivalled Western European countries and the United States.

After Europe and the United States intervened, today, Libya is a failed-State. Libya’s wealth has dried up or been syphoned into private pockets. Today, after the NAO intervention Libya will not achieve not a single MDG. In Syria its people have been forced to turn their attention to defending their sovereignty from multiple foreign-led aggressions, while watching the United States and NATO allies bomb what is left of war-torn towns into the rubble. And Iraq, after two US and allied wars killed an estimated as many a one million Iraqi children and scared many whole generations to come, Iraq is a State that is incapable of sustaining itself where insecurity is rabid.

Policy makers in Europe, the United States, and at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium, appear to have given little or no thought to the decades of social upheaval that they were causing by instigating violence in Africa and Middle East. Instead they appear to have acted based on selfish near-term interests. They did not even observe the international law that they, themselves, predominately wrote. Instead they flaunted this law with impunity to secure their short-sighted goals.

To date few, and no senior, American or European has been prosecuted for the terror they caused in the region. Yet, the actions of these senior American or European leaders far outweighs the horrors perpetrated even by the likes of Al-Qaeda, ISIL, ISIS, or Boko Haram. In fact, it would not be an exaggeration to note that these Middle Eastern and African non-State entities are following in the foot-steps set in the sand by the United States and the European States.

The cause of Sub-Saharan migration might be more complex, but is no less traceable to Europe and the United States. Instead of recent wars and the relatively quick destruction of rapidly developing States, Africans have been subjected to long, sustained torture and slow deaths.

The exploitation of Africa goes back centuries starting with the subjugation of millions of Africans to slavery and colonization mainly by Europeans and Americans. Much of Europe and the United States of America was build with the blood and sweat of African slaves and the fruits of European colonization.

Slavery and colonization are international crimes and States that carry out such actions are responsible for their internationally wrongful acts, including the consequences of compensation. Nevertheless, to date no compensation has been paid to African countries by the European or Americans who profited from slavery and colonization.

This is not for want of claims. Claims are regularly made for reparations or compensation in international forums, but they are ignored or to put aside with trivial and often inconsistent excuses. Europeans and Americans claims Arabs or Africans themselves were often responsible for the slave trade, minimizing their own much more significant responsibility. On the other hand, they then sometimes reply to claims of reparations by claiming they, Europeans and Americans, have already suffered enough from the indignity of having conducted the slave trade.

Is there any European and American legal jurisdiction that absolves criminals from responsibility for their crimes based on their claim that the act of committing a crime is demeaning? Of course committing a crime is demeaning for the perpetrator, but it is even more so for the victim. That is exactly why the law punishes criminals or establishes systems aimed at rehabilitating them.

In the case of Europe and the United States it would appear that rehabilitation has not worked as despite well-endowed universities and formally functioning electoral and political systems, these countries have not learned to respect the rule of international law. Reflecting this widespread view Western-schooled, United States’ ally Ms Tzipi Livni, at the time the Justice Minister of Israel, reportedly stated that “I am against law, international law in particular.” This statement today reflects the way both executive and often judicial authorities act in many European and American legal jurisdictions.

But as if centuries of slavery were not enough hardship for Africans, they have been followed by economic exploitation that is ongoing to this day. After having been pressured to ignore their own proposals for a New International Economic Order, which the United Nations adopted in numerous resolutions in the 1970s, developing countries, especially Africans and Middle East countries, have been coerced into accepting an economic order that is unfair to them.

While this economic order has a development model inbedded into to it created by Europeans and Americans the so-called donor countries. The development model has been an abject failure. This is attested to by the small number of States that have graduated from developing to developed States even using the UN low threshold over the last fifty years.

At the same time the gap between developed and developing States has increased. The rich have become richer, the poor have become poorer. By many standards there is less equity and equality in the world today than there has been during the lifetime of anybody alive today.

Still Europeans and Americans object to efforts aimed towards ensuring equity. In climate change talks they ignore the legal obligations of financing, capacity building, and technology access they have unanimously agreed to more than twenty years ago in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. They even challenge the principle established in this treaty that lends itself most to achieving equity, arguing that the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities is outdated despite the persistence of gross inequalities.

In the negotiations on the Post-2015 Development Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals that will shape them, European countries and the United States reject any language placing the blame on them for the inequalities in the world.

With a blind eye for reality it is no wonder that the United Kingdom’s British Broadcasting Corporation, more widely known as the BBC, reports with such ignorance about the so-called ‘European migration crisis’. A recent BBC broadcast completely failed to mentioned a single root cause. When a commentator from Save the Children indirectly hinted at root causes she was abruptly cut off by the BBC news presenter because time was up. The BBC then cut to the holiday weather, hardly a time sensitive subject that needed to be broadcast without a fifteen or thirty second delay that could have allowed for at least an illusion to the root causes of the so-called ‘European migration crisis’.

The BBC’s treatment of the ‘European migration crisis’ was echoed by European leaders a few days later when they met in Brussels. The Italian Prime Minister sought a sharing solution linked with yet more violence. The violence was to be aimed at destroying the ships on which migrants are being transported. This near-sighted proposal may however merely lead to migrants coming on less-sea worthy boats.

Other European States proposed dealing with North African authorities, but this mere empowers often undemocratic governments that came to power at the barrel of a gun and under which human rights abuses are rife.

Fixes for the ‘European migration crisis’, especially those involving the use of force, are merely likely to take more lives rather than save them. The correct response demands much deeper consideration. Until European States and the United States and their allies look at the root causes of migration and adequately address them, the ‘European migration crisis’ will merely intensify. The current strategy of building barriers to migrants will only stimulate the creativity migrants and traffickers use to circumvent the obstacles they face.

If Europe and the United States really want to deal with the so-called ‘European migration crisis’ they will need to start by admitting to themselves, and the world, that they are the cause of it. Europeans and Americans will have to sit with their African and Middle East counterparts. They will have to break out of their huddles that are protective of their narrow national interests. The will have to engage in an open and transparent manner with the aim of achieving cooperation to address the root causes of the crisis, not merely the temporary manifestations.

This in turn will ultimately require Europe and the United States to share the benefits of their lengthy exploitation of the Middle East and Africa in a much more equitable manner. It will also require Europe and the United States to provide reparations to Africans and the people of the Middle East for the violence and exploitation they have suffered at the hands of Europeans and the Americans.

Do Europeans and Americans have the courage and integrity to act to address the root causes of the ‘European migration crisis’? Millions of migrants from the Middle East and Africa didn’t think so to date. There are however another almost 2 billion people in the Middle East and Africa who are still willing to give the Europeans and Americans the benefit of the doubt, but only time will tell if they will be forced to act as have their compatriots.

Corporate Green-Washing

Pete Dolack

Earth Day was celebrated three days early in New York City, with a pop-up shopping mall in a park. Green-washing in all its glory: We’ll shop our way to a clean environment and a re-stabilized climate! Adding a touch of bitter irony, this corporate green-washing took place in Union Square, traditionally a site for organized protest.

Although not really expecting anything different, going only to hand out fliers against the pending Trans-Pacific and Transatlantic “free trade” agreements and the threat these agreements pose to knowing what is in the food you buy, it was nonetheless a depressing spectacle. There were large displays there for Toyota and Honda — the automobile industry can not realistically be described as “green.” Citibank was there, too, as were a collection of food companies who brand themselves as environmentally sensitive but are owned by multi-national behemoths who don’t believe you have a right to know what is in the food you eat.

The two automobile companies were hyping electric vehicles. A bit less fossil fuel exhausts adding to the atmospheres’s carbon dioxide is good, yes, but building and driving an electric-powered automobile hardly qualifies as a stroke for a cleaner world. An electric automobile still has the metal, plastic, rubber, glass and other raw materials a gas-guzzling one has. By one estimate, 56 percent of all all the pollution they will ever produce comes before the vehicle hits the road.

Then there is the matter of where the electricity comes from; the electricity used to power the vehicle is only as clean as its source. A full two-thirds of electricity produced in the U.S. comes from fossil fuels. Coal is the biggest source of U.S. electricity, accounting for 39 percent in 2014; natural gas, also a huge contributor to global warming, is the second biggest source at 27 percent. About half of European electricity comes from coal or natural gas.

So increasing electricity usage, if it means an increase in coal or other global-warming and polluting sources, isn’t “green.” Then we would need to consider the battery for an electric vehicle, which is not without greenhouse-gas emissions and which contains nickel as a major input. Nickel exposure can cause damage to blood, lung, noses, kidneys, reproductive systems and skin. Mining it causes not only pollution but contributes to global warming. So, again, not really “green.”

And Citibank as a “green” enterprise? A 2011 report by a coalition of environmental groups, “Bankrolling Climate Change,” found that Citibank provided more than €4 billion in financing for coal mining in the previous five years, the third highest total of any bank in the world, and is also one of the top three financiers of mountain-top removal coal operations.

“Organic” brands that promote GMO foods

Two of the sponsors of New York City’s Earth Day fair were Morningstar Farms and Honest Tea. Both had prominent displays. But these are not mom-and-pop operations; both are part of multi-national conglomerates. Morningstar Farms is owned by Kellogg Company and Honest Tea by Coca-Cola Company. Coca-Cola contributed $1.2 million and Kellogg more than $600,000 to the corporate effort that narrowly defeated California ballot measure Proposition 37 in 2012, which would have required labels on genetically engineered foods and banned the industry practice of marketing GMO-tainted foods as “natural.”

Most natural foods brands have been swallowed by multi-national corporate behemoths, which gladly use consumers’ money for purposes anathema to organic consumers’ interests. The Cornucopia Institute notes that:

“[M]any iconic organic brands are owned by the titans of junk food, processed food and sugary beverages—the same corporations that spent millions to defeat GMO labeling initiatives in California and Washington. General Mills (which owns Muir Glen, Cascadian Farm, and LaraBar), Coca-Cola (Honest Tea, Odwalla), J.M. Smucker (R.W. Knudsen, Santa Cruz Organic), and many other corporate owners of organic brands contributed big bucks to deny citizens’ right to know what is in their food.”

The Cornucopia Institute also reports that Morningstar Farms’ veggie burgers (along with several other brands) are produced using hexane, an air pollutant and neurotoxin. The institute writes:

“In order to meet the demands of health-conscious consumers, manufacturers of soy-based fake meat like to make their products have as little fat as possible. The cheapest way to do this is by submerging soybeans in a bath of hexane to separate the oil from the protein. Says Cornucopia Institute senior researcher Charlotte Vallaeys, ‘If a non-organic product contains a soy protein isolate, soy protein concentrate, or texturized vegetable protein, you can be pretty sure it was made using soy beans that were made with hexane.’ … Troubling, then, that the FDA does not monitor or regulate hexane residue in foods.”

At least two New York City food coops refuse to carry Morningstar Farms products. Yet there it prominently was at the Earth Day fair, with passers-by lining up to be green-washed.

And then we have Honest Tea, or more accurately, Coca-Cola, its owner. The worldwide string of human rights abuses that Coca-Cola is so frequently implicated in speaks for itself. The activist group Killer Coke has compiled a country-by-country list of outrages in various countries, including thousands of children, as young as eight-years-old, used as labor on El Salvador sugar-cane farms that supply the company; multiple kidnappings and murders of union officials at a bottling plant in Guatemala; and, in the Philippines, the use of outsourced labor to avoid paying benefits and accusations of “smuggling” sugar into the country to avoid taxes and undercut local sugar producers.

Shopping is not participation in your world

The organizers of Earth Day New York, said to be organized by an unspecified “broad coalition of environmental groups,” have this to say about it:

“Earth Day is more than a one-day event or annual environmental wake-up call. It is a catalyst for ongoing education, action, and change. It simultaneously broadens the base of support and rekindles old commitments through highly participatory strategies.”

So there we have it: Consumption of corporate products falsely branded as “green” or “environmentally friendly” is participatory! Undoubtedly, many, perhaps most, of the people passing through Union Square that day wish to be have a lighter footprint on the Earth and have would like to diminish their contribution to global warming. But to do that requires less consumption, not a re-arrangement of unsustainable consumption patterns.

Above all, it will require a complete overhaul of the world’s economy. Most of the ideas floated to deal with greenhouse-gas emissions reaching a critical point feature untested technologies, reliance on biofuels that are no less polluting than fossil-fuel energy or various other techno-fixes. The cost of all these too good to be true “solutions” to global warming will be virtually nothing, according to, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report issued last year.

Alas, cost-free “green capitalism” is an illusion. The economies of the world’s advanced capitalist countries are highly dependent on consumerism; household spending accounts for 60 percent or more of gross domestic products across the global North. Wasteful practices such as planned obsolescence exist to continually induce us to buy more and more products. And nor is it simply a matter of wishing away polluting industries — capitalism has no mechanism to provide jobs for the untold millions of people who would be thrown out of work if just the most polluting industries were shut down.

Production in the capitalist system is done for private profit, not for human need; environmental costs are externalized. Thus a capitalist corporation, faced with the need to expand because of the rigors of competition and forced to focus on “maximizing shareholder value” over all other values by market forces, has to expand and dump as much of the costs of its production, including pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions, on society as possible. It also means that popular demands for “green” products are nothing more than a marketing opportunity to exploit.

Producing products that consume less energy and resources is certainly good, but if more of these are being produced, then there is no real savings. All the incentives in capitalism are for more production, more consumption.

There is no alternative to drastically reducing what is consumed and building a new economy based on human need, incentivized to protect the environment and possessing the flexibility to re-deploy labor in large numbers when industries are reduced or eliminated. This would require a socialized economy that would have no need to grow. We can’t shop or grow our way out of environmental crisis. No amount of corporate green-washing can render “green capitalism” anything other than an illusion nor can shopping replace organized activism.

Brazil: Challenges of a Landless People

Armando Carmona

Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the longest standing and largest social movements in Latin America, continues to be a relevant force in the lives of everyday communities and families. The MST has three objectives, a continued struggle over land, a “people’s land reform” that is implemented nationally, and the transformation of civil society. Their purpose is not singular, and though their close attempts at a relationship with the Workers Party (PT) has brought them much criticism, their politics remain rooted in practice.

In the early months of 2015, a series of protests and demonstrations emerged against the PT regarding the Lava Jato corruption scandals and to shift political “alliances between influential groups and… political funding.” Protests with much less coverage have highlighted the party’s increasingly neoliberal attacks on the working class.

The MST has its critiques of the PT and the current administration of Dilma Rousseff, specifically for not making due on their promises for land reform and for having less support for legal settlements, while investing more in agribusiness and large agricultural industries.However, the MST did not participate in anti-Dilma or pro-impeachment demonstrations particularly because of the right wing nature of these protests and their attendance of mostly upper middle class people. Instead they have focused some of their energy on new land occupations, reinvigorating their community base support and their understanding of a landless people’s movement.

To be landless in Brazil is not understood simply as a social condition or an identity for the marginalized. To define one’s self as landless implies agency and a commitment to a community made up of active subjects that are working towards the construction of their own history. This category of the landless has been transformative for the everyday lives of those involved.  As opposed to an individualized struggle for property ownership, the landless of Brazil see themselves as a collective subject firmly standing against multiple levels of material, ideological, and physical violence. This movement navigates a landscape of misinformation by media, displacement by military police, attacks by landowners and growing right-wing militias, in addition to the dismissive attitude of government officials.

The struggle of the MST is both political, pedagogical and a challenge to western notions of private property and land ownership. They have extensive networks of educators in charge of political formation through a pedagogia de la terra or pedagogy of the land, which draws heavily from scholars and militants like the well-known philosopher Paulo Freire. They are best known for occupying unused land, but their actual process to negotiate and acquire the land legally is less known. Those who identify as “landless” are not only MST; there are multiple organizations whose objective is land reform and land acquisition for the dispossessed. Some have subtle ideological differences, while others are divided by party lines.

The lands the MST occupies are carefully selected. The coordinating leadership investigates the areas, carefully looking at who the owners are, which political and social agents exist, other projects and networks that they are linked to, and of course, where the money is going and coming from. Land concentration in Brazil is one of the biggest issues that the MST is struggling to combat. Wealthy landowners, politicians, businesspeople and increasingly agribusiness that have the resources to purchase massive farmlands industrial agricultural production are typically not interested, and strongly resist, being forced into a negotiation.

Once the initial occupation has begun the MST forces a negotiation. The process is long and tedious. It often takes several years to negotiate a settlement; there have been families who have waited from two to twelve years to come to an agreement with Brazil’s National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) and the landowners. INCRA is the government institution in charge of settling these “land disputes.” After several years of negotiation INCRA facilitates payment to the landowner using federal funds, the landless families agree to pay them back after a number of years through profits made through small scale agricultural production. This delay, however, leaves landless people in a precarious position, where many are susceptible to violence, harassment and discrimination. Violence on these occupied lands has increased, and many of the landless say that there is an increase in militias and paramilitaries that are organized to protect the landowners and what they consider private property.

Overall, the biggest obstacle for the landless is government bureaucracy and unfulfilled promises. Yet their unique challenge, one that has helped make them the region’s largest social movement, is to look within the MST and place their expectations beyond the limitations of an electoral process that some argue “has died in the most shameful way possible, buried by accusations of cynicism, venality, and corruption.”

As April 2015 comes to a close, the MST are completing “Abril Vermelho” (Red April) in commemoration of the Eldorado dos Carajas Massacre in 1996, which left 21 MST members killed. They use this moment to increase their visibility and the numbers of land occupations. Though their challenges remain, the MST continues to push forward in their efforts toward land reform and what they consider a transformation of civil society.

The Struggle for Peace with Justice and Dignity

Andrew Smolski 

Watch El Poeta on PBS, part of VOCES, Latino Public Broadcasting’s arts and culture series. The PBS premiere of El Poeta airs May 1^st. Check your local PBS station for times. Just go to www.pbs.org, enter your local station, and then check the schedule for May 1^st (for example, in Raleigh, NC it will air at 10:30 P.M.).

If it is not airing on your local PBS station, write or call them to get this documentary on the air. It is important that people understand the suffering and pain caused by the Drug War, and the way struggle unites us transnationally to end the misery.

Also, starting May 2^nd, and lasting two weeks, the film will be available online at www.pbs.org. The streaming link can be shared on your Facebook, Twitter, etc. So, if you watch it that way, make sure to share.

***

“They tried to bury us. They did not know were seeds.” – Mexican Proverb

When I watched the documentary, El Poeta, I sat in silence when it ended. My silence was an unspoken acknowledgement of Javier Sicilia’s last poem, written for his murdered son:

“There is nothing else to say / The world is not worthy of the word / They suffocated it, deep inside of us…All we have is a world / For the silence of the just / Only for your silence / and my silence, Juanelo”.

This would be his last poem, because as Sicilia would later write, quoting Theodor Adorno, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbarity”. Words, powerful as they are, fail the Poet, as no refrain is sufficient to break through the void created by reality’s human-induced cruelty.

The loss of ability to articulate pain through words is where El Poeta, directed by Kelly Duane de la Vega and Katie Galloway, through the visualization of suffering and struggle, permits us to re-embark upon truth’s journey. It is a journey to understand the transcendental meaning of justice as an ideal to be strived for in the name of the oppressed, of the victims. No longer is justice the regulated process of judging those deemed “criminals” by the obscene system. Justice is the prosecution of the obscene social system itself, of the governments that make it up, of the elites who benefit from it, of transnational capitalism and its corporate representatives. And this justice is sought in the name, voice, and symbol of the innocent. It is here where El Poeta begins, and where it ends.

El Poeta begins by making the drug war an international phenomenon, explicating its birth in 1971 during the Nixon administration, and its Mexican birth in 2006 during the Felipe Calderón’s administration. It also begins with simple white lettering on a black background with the statement, “Since 2006 more than 100,000 have been murdered or disappeared in Mexico – many innocent civilians.” The transition from grim reality to Sicilia’s gruff voice telling us that “Hope is a lovely word”, also sets the tenor of El Poeta, at once about immense pain, and at the same time, about the solidarity in struggle bringing hope back to illuminate the shadows cast by the violence. The struggle is to make Sicilia, those who walk beside him, and their home, México lindo, whole again.

Javier Sicilia, photo by Peter Hapak.

The horizon Sicilia references throughout El Poeta becomes the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity’s ideal of justice and democracy. This movement is built after the murder of Sicilia’s son, Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega, and six of his friends, on March 28^th, 2011 in Cuernavaca, Morelos. As El Poeta explains, Calderón had been exclaiming that the majority of victims were not innocents, but instead involved with narcotrafficking. Thus, the State considered them justifiable collateral damage, or even more callously, deserving of death. With the death of Sicilia’s son, where innocence was impossible to dismiss, victims across México were able to lift up their voices in unison against the violence that has taken so many of their children and countrymen.

As Ruben Martinez describes, the victims’ parents and families cried, “Our children were innocent too!” Sicilia, in the firmest manner possible, stated during a press conference, “Citizens are sacred. Kids are sacred. Our young people are sacred. Don’t touch them!” We must extrapolate from this a statement of universal justice, for if everyone is someone’s kid, then no one should be touched, or be defamed. Any act which infringes upon the sacred is profane, and produces suffering, unnecessary and unending suffering. And this universal justice is infringed upon every day by the insecurity created by what Juan Francisco’s godfather, Jorge González de León, calls, “the narcostate”.

That narcostate doesn’t exist in a vacuum. El Poeta demonstrates that the narcostate is related to the corruption of the political system, the Merida Initiative’s militarization of Mexico’s drug war with US funding, and the impunity criminal acts are committed with. Further, authorities are culpable for these atrocities, both as perpetrators of criminal acts, and for failing to generate an equal and free society. Sicilia is direct with Calderón, both in private and public meetings; Calderón is responsible for these thousands of dead, the government is responsible. And, the US is culpable for pursuing these policies, by utilizing its geopolitical power to militarize Mexico, and purchasing weapons from its own military-industrial complex for the Mexican Government.

The US government’s callous, “collateral damage” thinking is demonstrated by a clip of Sen. Lindsey Graham asking Anthony Placido, Drug Enforcement Administration Assistant Administrator, “Do you believe that the efforts of President Calderón are winning the day or are we losing ground, or how would you characterize the war?” Placido responds, “The commitment and resolve of the Mexican Government is unprecedented…But, I believe this government is making progress, and that the violence we see is actually a sign post of success.” Placido echoes Calderón, who as well stated that innocent lives are worth fighting the drug cartels, that “I’m sorry I didn’t send the federal forces sooner.”

The bombastic barbarity of the elites on both sides of the fronterademonstrates their moral abdication and how they have forsaken their peoples to misery as a strategic decision to fight the results of their own economic and political failings. The elites’ vulgarity is contrasted with the compassion of those striving for justice, as the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity stops and Sicilia hugs a child orphaned by the murder of his parents, casualties in this unnecessary war. As Sicilia states, “This boy was the face of the country, a child abandoned, orphaned, with nobody to stand up for him. It is the image I carry with me the most, it is very present.”

Katie Galloway, Javier Sicilia, and Kelly de la Vega with credit Courtesy of Loteria Films.

When Sicilia and the Caravan for Peace with Justice and Dignity travel to the US they are met with a silence from the majority, a majority whose connection to the drug war is their children using drugs, or a nightly newscast demonizing those affected. However, there is a minority, a minority who is affected by the violence the Drug War causes, African-Americans in the US. They have been brutalized by militarized police, had their families destroyed by incarceration. El Poeta ends by making this very clear connection, a connection of the oppressed. An African-American mother in Baltimore tells of her beloved son, who “eight years ago on Sept. 27^th, 2004…was murdered at the age of 16.” She goes on to say, “I just met 4 mothers, who recently lost their sons.” Those mothers then begin to chant as the mother passes the microphone, “You are not alone! No eres sola!”

Throughout El Poeta, I was reminded of one of Sicilia’s poems, “Lucas 1, 30-33”, in La Presencia Desierta: Poesía 1982-2004. In the poem, Sicilia uses Mary as a way to express the material-becoming of God on Earth. As God becomes flesh and bone, this leads to the absence of angels to assist humans, who must continue to do the work and arrive at the “real” of life. Continuing to work is based on their faith that they can arrive at the “real”, as they lose contact with the angels. In El Poeta, the real is justice, and the people are carrying on with their work knowing that it may not end the violence now, but they should have faith it will. Sicilia and other members of the movement repeat throughout El Poetaa similar message, the justification for struggle is that in the process we take responsibility for universal justice, we create the world we want to live in. Or as it is stated in Luke, “The kingdom of God is within you.”

***

To demonstrate my gratitude to Javier Sicilia, whose writings have inspired me over the past three years, I would like to repeat his demands:

“the San Andres Accords must be respected, stop the war, free José Manuel Mireles, his self-defense forces, Nestora Salgado, Mario Luna, and all political prisoners, bring justice for the victims of violence, judge the criminal politicians, and boycott the elections.”

Sharing in the transnational focus of the documentary, I would like to include my own:

“end the Merida Initiative, respect the 14^th Amendment of the US Constitution, justice for Walter Scott, and for all black lives struggling against police brutality, end the drug war, demilitarize the police, reparations for the effects of the New and Old Jim Crows and Slavery, and here, as there, boycott the elections.”

Victims of the Drug War Named in El Poeta:

Juan Francisco Sicilia Ortega

Jocilia Ramirez

Joaquin

Pablino Ramirez Reyes

Antonio

Viviana Rayas

Juan Carlos

Juan Julian Fernandez Alvarez

Nepomuceno Moreno (murdered for speaking out against the government)