CLANDESTINES: THE PIRATE JOURNALS OF AN IRISH EXILE - a book by ramor ryan

book launch in dublin

2011-10-14T06:11:00.000-07:00

"Zapatista Spring" by Ramor Ryan
Party, book launch and reading
22nd October, 8:00pm-00:30am
Dj- music- byob
Seomra Spraoi, 10 Belvedere Court, Dublin 1
http://seomraspraoi.org/

http://akpress.com/2011/items/zapatistaspring
"Ramor Ryan is a brilliant story-teller, and Zapatista Spring is impossible to put down. In this vivid account of democracy and solidarity in action, the pages overflow with humanity, wit, and the mountains and mud of Chiapas. This candid story should be read by anyone who has been inspired by the Zapatistas."—Ben Dangl, author of Dancing with Dynamite.

In "Zapatista Spring", Irish activist Ramor Ryan tells the exhilarating story of eight international volunteers working with indigenous campesinos to build a community water system in a Zapatista hamlet called Roberto Arenas in Chiapas, Mexico. A fantastic storyteller, Ryan vividly brings to life the interpersonal dramas of the international brigade, the challenges of doing Zapatista solidarity work amidst a dangerous climate of right-wing military repression, and day-to-day life in a remote Tzeltal community of subsistence family farmers. Ryan's writing is especially rich and you really feel like you're in the Lacandon Rainforest, knee-deep in mud, experiencing first-hand the mountains, rivers, snakes, alligators, and mosquitoes that comprise this tropical bioregion. The eight volunteers are themselves fascinating characters that you will enjoy meeting, from Josef, a straight-edge vegan from Poland, and Nebula, an anarchist sex worker from Barcelona, to Omar, a gay Arab filmmaker, and Tlaxlocaztla, a Chicana student looking for her roots. I won't spoil the ending, but I will tell you that it is sad and tragic and all too typical of the Mexican government's campaign to crush the Zapatista movement. (To find out what happens you will have to read the book!) In summary, not only is it highly important and informative, it is also really good literature. Moreover, it is also visually very beautiful, containing many powerful black-and-white photos of Chiapas and an awesome cover.

2011-03-08T23:03:00.000-08:00

April Publication

2011-01-28T16:28:00.000-08:00

Zapatista Spring: Autonomy and a Water Project
by Ramor Ryan
Publication Date - April 2011. AK Press. 210 pages.

The book tells the story of a solidarity project to install a potable
water system in a Zapatista base community located on occupied land.
Offering their technical knowledge, their solidarity and enthusiasm
for the Zapatista struggle for autonomy and self-determination, a
group of anarchists from Mexico City, the US and Europe are sent by
the Zapatista Revolutionary Clandestine Committee to the village of
Roberto Arenas deep within the Lacandon Jungle. Living and working
with the companer@s for 10 weeks, the activists experienced rebel joy
and the wretched hardships of abject poverty in equal measure.
"Zapatista Spring" explores the notion of international solidarity,
and examines questions provoked by the water project experience: how
are meaningful bridges of solidarity built between privileged
activists of the North and those of the disadvantaged South? When is
solidarity no more than charity, and when does it really help build
autonomy?

Oaxaca: Aftermath of the Ambush

2010-05-13T14:56:00.000-07:00

San Juan Copala Calls for Second Human Rights Caravan to Break Siege.
by Ramor Ryan, Oaxaca May 12th.
UpsideDownWorld.com

In an act of implacable defiance, the Autonomous Municipality of San
Juan Copala has called on civil organizations to organize another
Human Rights caravan to attempt to break the paramilitary blockade
surrounding their besieged headquarters in the indigenous Triqui
region of Oaxaca, Mexico. The caravan, called for May 30-31, hopes for
the participation of hundreds of national and international human
Rights observers and activists, and will be convened by Diocesan
Commission of Peace and Justice, and the Bartolomé Carrasco Regional
Human Rights Center .

The first Caravan which attempted to break the San Juan Copala siege
was ambushed on the isolated road to the community on April 27 by 25
masked and heavily armed paramilitaries, resulting in the death of two
activists, while injuring a dozen more.

Blame for the attack was attributed by the Autonomous Municipality
authorities to “groups of paramilitaries from the Union of Social
Welfare for the Triqui Region Organization [UBISORT, in its Spanish
initials] linked to the PRI [the governing party of Oaxaca State, the
Institutional Revolutionary Party].”

The two dead were well-known and respected human rights defenders.
Bety Carino Trujillo, director of the local NGO Cactus, which focuses
on indigenous and communitarian rights, was one of the primary
organizers of the fated caravan, and had recently toured Europe giving
testimony to the violence suffered by indigenous communities in
resistance in her home state of Oaxaca. Her words, somewhat
prophetically dwelling on the life and death struggle of her people,
are recorded here in Dublin, Ireland. The Finnish citizen Jyry Antero
Jaakkola was a popular activist who worked on a (as yet unrealized)
project to send a ship full of humanitarian aid from Europe to
beleaguered communities in Mexico–from Oaxaca to Chiapas. Jyry was
currently working closely with the Oaxaca City- based, and
predominantly anarchist group VOCAL (Oaxacan Voices Constructing
Autonomy and Freedom). Understanding the dangers faced in the struggle
in Oaxaca, he expressed his willingness to stand alongside his Mexican
companeros and the social movement in their resistance against
government repression.

“We know the risks involved in social activism in Oaxaca, and we knew
the risks going into San Juan Copala on April 27,” explained one of
the survivors of the ambush in an interview given to to Upside Down
World this week in Oaxaca City. The radical activist who asked to
remain anonymous for reasons of security, maintains they did the right
thing despite criticisms from other activist sectors that it was a
dangerous and foolhardy expedition.

“When the autonomous municipality put out a call for observers to
break the siege, we answered that call because of the terrible
situation faced by the people. These companeros had come to Oaxaca
City during the uprising of 2006 and now it was our turn to go to them
in their time of need. Solidarity, togetherness–this is what the
movement is all about.”

While the first caravan was initially imagined as far bigger, various
actors pulled out at the last moment out of fear, while others simply
couldn’t find the meeting point, and so the eventual group that set
off on the road numbered a much reduced 22 people. The group agreed
amongst themselves that at the first sign of trouble, they would turn
back. They didn’t want to provoke anything with the paramilitaries,
but they also wanted the beleaguered community to know that they were
not alone. And so they set off hoping to get as close as they could,
and maybe even achieve the goal of delivering humanitarian aid in the
form of food and medicine thus breaking the 5 month long siege, both
materially and psychologically.

The Autonomous Municipality of San Juan Copala, created in January of
2007 by a breakaway group of Triqui’s inspired by the Zapatista model,
was an act of rebel impudence that did not go unnoticed by the state
authorities, who immediately began consolidating other Triqui groups
into an armed opposition. The state government, according to Proceso
magazine, “ channeled millions of pesos into the Triqui organizations
Ubisort and Mult to contest the newly created Autonomous
Municipality.” That financial support was used to arm and train the
paramilitaries and a reign of violence engulfed the zone – there have
been 19 politically-linked assassinations in the Trique region since
December 2009 alone.

The siege on the autonomous municipality began in November, 2009.
Paramilitaries from Ubisort set up road-blocks and cut the town’s
electricity and telephone lines. The town market closed as the flow of
goods and services ceased, and the schools shut down. Some 700
families were trapped within the blockade. Meanwhile, the governor
Ulises Ruiz Ortiz and state authorities looked the other way or
insisted, cynically, that it was an “internal Triqui issue.” Citing
“ancestral conflicts and inter-community strife”, they washed their
hands of the situation. “The Mexican State benefits more than anyone
else when the Triqui are fighting amongst themselves. But the region’s
political and economic bosses also benefit,” explains lawyer and
investigator Francisco López Bárcenas, emphasizing the political
interests in maintaining the violence. Why send in the security forces
or army, when the paramilitaries are doing the job of destroying the
Autonomous Municipality for them?

“Mexico is a dangerous country to defend Human Rights,” commented
Amnesty International in their Demand Dignity report, highlighting the
case of two young Triqui women, Teresa Bautista Merino and Felicitas
Martinez Sanchez who worked on the autonomous community radio station
The Voice That Breaks the Silence. The duo, presenters of a radio show
denouncing human rights abuses, were similarly ambushed and killed by
paramilitaries in the region in April, 2008.

Nevertheless, even in a country where according to the Office of the
High Commissioner of Human Rights of the United Nations, eleven human
rights activists have been murdered since 2006, the ambush of the
Human Rights observers caravan is unprecedented in its audacity.

“These kind of brazen attacks on Human Rights missions don’t even take
place in war zones like Colombia, Iraq or Afghanistan,” pointed out
Contralinea, an investigative magazine who sent two reporters on the
caravan.

So nobody on the caravan expected what came next as they approached a
makeshift blockade of stones strewn across the road in a quiet,
deserted part of the hilly terrain on April 27.

The human rights defenders, sensing danger, decided to turn around
immediately and head back. As they u-turned the three vehicles,
legions of masked figures started streaming down the rocky hillside
towards them, pointing AK-47’s. Without warning or indication the 20
or so gunmen opened fire and didn’t stop for a quarter of an hour. “A
rain of bullets enveloped us,” explained one survivor. In the panic
and confusion of the assault, Bety and Jyry were both shot dead on the
spot, while others fled into the surrounding hills seeking cover,
pursued by the attackers.

A few days later, sitting in a dark bar near the bustling Oaxaca City
market, the radical activist and ambush survivor is pondering upon his
escape, while his good friend Jyri perished.

“It’s the fourth attempt on my life since 2006,” he explains. “I’ve
been lucky so far. I’m just trying to be as effective as possible as
long as I’m still alive.”

As we talk, news comes through on the attack on another militant from
the Popular Assembly of the Peoples of Oaxaca (APPO) on his way to
work that morning. Marcelino Coache, a well known public speaker and
movement activist who last year was kidnapped and tortured by unknown
assailants presumed to be a death squad, was once again attacked by
assailants, who stabbed him and left him for dead. But he survives.

“Here in Oaxaca such is the level of state-sponsored aggression and
total impunity,” explains the activist, “that these death-squads or
the paramilitaries can pull off yet another stunt like this on
Marcelino or the ambush in Copala without fear of consequences. They
can do whatever they want to do. They have backing right to the top.”

Indeed, State Governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz insists on referring to the
ambush as a “confrontation between the community and national and
international activists.” The governor, publicly denounced recently as
a tyrant (by members of his own PRI party!), when asked about the
death of the Finnish Human Rights activist Jyri, countered by asking
about the visa status of the foreigner. “It is against the
Constitution for foreigners to be involved in Mexican politics.”

Which brings to mind the problematic of the second caravan to break
the siege of San Juan Copala. Not all activists in the city are in
agreement in sending another caravan into the “intractable Triqui
situation.” Add to the measure the suspicion that Ubisort are involved
in narco-activities and therefore, like in other parts of the country
wracked by the "Drug War", where narco-lords, state officials and
security forces are in tight collaboration (‘Colombiaization’), the
security of the caravan is anything but certain. Members of the
Autonomous Municipal Authority have called for State police protection
for the caravan, while Governor Ruiz Ortiz has promised to block the
caravan, and deport any foreigners on it.

“If we can get 1000 people, or more, they can’t stop us,” says the
radical activist. This seasoned militant is hopeful that the teachers
union, Section 22, the backbone of the 2006 uprising, will mobilize in
big numbers for the second caravan. But the teachers have been in a
state of disarray of late and will be overseeing a state-wide teachers
strike at the same time. Meanwhile the formerly powerful social
movement is also heavily divided, and feeling the pressure of years of
unceasing repression.

“We reaffirm our commitment to never give up, because the future we
yearn for is near,” ends the communique from the San Juan Copala
Autonomous Municipality, sent out from the municipal headquarters now
under its fifth month of blockade. “We know that the night is darkest
before the dawn."

Celebrating Indigenous Culture, Zapotec Autonomy and Uncontaminated Corn

2010-02-22T09:13:00.000-08:00

Written by by Ramor Ryan, Photos by Ali Tonak
Monday, 15 February 2010

Santa Gertrudis, Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca - The 4th annual Zapotec Feria of the Cornfield - Globalization and the Natural Resources - was held in Santa Gertrudis, Sierra Juarez on February 7-8. Organized by the Union of Social Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO), this year´s event was attended by representatives of UNOSJO´s 24 affiliated communities, participants from all over Mexico, along with a large international presence of activists from Uruguay to Wales, Turkey to the United States, as well as a 17-strong delegation of German Organic farmers and anti-GMO activists.

This year´s theme was focused on the dangers of contamination from Genetically Modified (GM) Corn, with a showcase of indigenous corn based culture and food sovereignty.

“We plant corn for the well-being of the communities,” said community leader, Rodrigo Santiago Hernandez during the opening plenary, emphasizing the importance of the culture of corn for the Zapotecs.“If we don’t cultivate corn, we have no life. It is central to our existence. We are the people of corn.”

Or as the old saying goes – no hay pais, sin maiz (there is no country without maize).

Community President, Baltazar Felix, elaborated, “To be a campesino or campesina allows us to respect and understand the profound worth of our madre tierra (mother earth). Corn is the basis for our expression of autonomy and central to our usos y costumbres (practices and customs), which represent our Zapotec culture and indigenous way of life. “

Contaminated maize was first detected in Oaxaca in 2001, resulting in a serious threat to the biodiversity of the native species, because, as explained by Ana de Ita from CECCAM (Center of Studies for Change in the Mexican Countryside), “ genetically-modified crops have the potential to cross-breed with native crops, altering the evolution of the entire population”.

Pandering to the lobbyists from the bio-tech and agricultural industry interests like Cargill Corporation and Monsanto, the Neo-liberal PAN government of President Calderon reversed the 1998 ban on genetically-engineered seeds this March. Twenty-five pilot projects sowing transgenic seeds were begun in Northern Mexico. Genetically modified pollen has the capacity to travel great distances via wind or water sources, thereby threatening to contaminate the hundreds of unique and well-adapted land races of corn throughout all of Mexico, which is the center of origin of this staple food crop.

Canadian Mining Companies, US Pig Factories and Imperialist Mappers

Beyond the contamination of native corn, other pressing issues facing rural farmers in Oaxaca were outlined by the Zapotec representatives during the first day of the meeting.

The resumption of heavy mining in the Ocotlan region by Canadian multinational Fortuna Silver was heavily criticized by a representative from the front-line community of Capulalpam:

“We don’t want the mine. We don’t want our water source polluted and our environment destroyed. We, the local inhabitants were never consulted but now we are making our presence known.” Communities surrounding the mining region have being carrying out direct action against the mining company, mobilizing the population to block access on the roads, and stopping trucks and heavy machinery."

Canadian mining companies are not the only foreign industry negatively impacting the lives of the Zapotec indigenous. Concerns are raised about large-scale industrial farm animal production overseen by US agro-giants Tyson and Smithfield, generally held responsible for the outbreak of Swine Flu in November 2009, emanating from their enormous pig-factory facilities in nearby Valle de Perote, Veracruz. 64,322 cases of Swine Flu were confirmed in Mexico, resulting in 573 deaths.

The rich and abundant natural resources of the stunningly beautiful Sierra Juarez have also come under the scrutiny of more high-tech intruders. In 2009, Zapotec communities led by UNOSJO expelled US geographers mapping the region with GPS and data processing technology for failing to reveal their connections with the US military or their use of Pentagon contractor Radiance Technologies. Charging the Kansas University geographers with geo-piracy – stealing the traditional knowledge of the indigenous communities – the academics left in disgrace and subsequently were not heard from again. UNOSJO outlined how the military-funded geo-pirates had successfully been stopped in their tracks, and through the employment of people-power and media pressure, the affected Zapotec communities were able to protect and preserve their cultural heritage.

Usos y Costumbres

Nevertheless, the 4th annual Zapotec Feria of the Cornfield - Globalization and the Natural Resources - is not only concerned with the problems and struggles facing the Zapotec communities, but is also a celebration of their rich culture and food sovereignty. Day two of the feria brought a festive culinary demonstration of a myriad of corn dishes and locally produced food.

Among the various bustling stalls, the cooks explained their skills and techniques. A range of mouth-watering corn recipes were on the menu, including atole blanco, tortilla de platano, totpos de maiz, pozol, pozoncle, atole, tamales de 3 picos, mazorcas, and canavalia. Each dish can trace its origins to a particular place or district mapping the diversity of corn uses in Sierra Juarez. Alongside the dishes are source community names like Silvano Cruz Cruz, Santa Maria Temaxcalpa, San Cristóbal Lachirioag or Asunción Lachixila.

“Without money I can’t buy corn or beans. But if I plant the seeds, I can eat even if I don’t have money,” said Dona Maria from Lachixila. Explaining the connection between food self sufficiency and autonomy, she outlined the philosophy of the usos y costumbres. “A people who have to buy their seeds – in place of having a local bank of seeds held over from all the years – and who have to go out and buy their own food, these are people who cannot govern themselves.”

Autonomy is the cornerstone of the culture and political struggle of the Zapotec indigenous. With legal recognition of their traditional usos y costumbres, they are afforded a sense of identity and continuation with the past. The absence of state presence, or federal police and the army, in the communities is noticeable. We foreigners were treated to the somewhat surreal sight of autonomy in action as community authorities bundled a definitely worse for wear drunk in the community jail. “Before he hurts himself,” whispered Don Armando into my ear, himself enjoying the fine locally produced mescal that was the cause of that disheveled prisoners misfortune. Somewhat comically, the cheerfully painted village jail is positioned underneath the village comedor, or restaurant.

Looking Towards the Future

The drunk tank dweller undergoes a rude awaking on the third and final day of the Feria with the appearance of a 12-piece local brass band thundering their tunes directly outside the jail cell during the communal breakfast. More autonomous community punishment?

The highlight of Day Three was a tour of a cornfield and an exhibition of traditional small scale agricultural methods.

“The government would prefer that we all emigrated or worked in maquiladoras,” said Don Carlos, proudly showing the visitors his family corn patch, straddling the side of a steep mountain side, every inch of which he had patiently and painfully worked with machete and hoe. “They don’t want us to remain as campesinos. They say we are unproductive and useless. But we are going to stay here, in our cornfields, in our communities because this is what we want; this is what the people want.”

Back at the plenum, Zapotec leader Aldo Gonzalez of UNOSJO sums up the themes of the feria and articulates the conclusions of the event.

“The contamination of corn by means of transgenic seeds is a crime, because in this way, not only the food chain, but also our culture is contaminated. Corn is the base of resistance; it is water, land, culture. We have an intimate relationship with the land. That’s why we protect and conserve the diverse varieties of criolla maize which we have improved over the length of history and in this manner, we are defending our ancestral knowledge.”

Dispersing Power - Social Movements as Anti-State Forces

2010-01-31T15:14:00.000-08:00

by Raul Zibechi
Translated by Ramor Ryan

Raúl Zibechi is one of Latin America's leading political theorists. This, his first book translated into English, is an historical analysis of social struggles in Bolivia and the forms of community power instituted by that country's indigenous Aymara. Dispersing Power gracefully maps the "how" of revolution, offering valuable lessons to activists and new theoretical frameworks for understanding how social movements can and do operate independently of state-centered models for social change.

http://www.amazon.com/Dispersing-Power-Social-Movements-Anti-State/dp/1849350116

Critiquing the Trajectory of the Zapatista Movement

2010-01-30T22:25:00.000-08:00

Upside Down World - Tuesday, 15 December 2009

It has been noted, perhaps somewhat unfairly, that by this stage there are probably more books and papers written about the Zapatistas than there are actual Zapatista milicianos. Niels Barmeyer's new work, Developing Zapatista Autonomy: Conflict and NGO Involvement in Rebel Chiapas adds to this cannon, but distinguishes itself by coming from the perspective of a militant anthropologist, an embedded solidarity activist investigating— from below—the inner workings of the EZLN (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) and the solidarity and NGO organizations surrounding it. It also distinguishes itself by being more critical than most, certainly of those ostensibly coming from a sympathetic position.
The German anthropologist went to Chiapas in the 1990s, "drawn, like most other internationals, by notions of egalitarianism, communal living and independence from globalized economies."Barmeyer relates how he was originally captivated by the dynamic Zapatista movement through his involvement in the left/autonomous scene in Berlin which exposed him to ideas about participatory democracy and horizontal forms of social organization. He put these theories into practice through working in solidarity with the Zapatistas in Chiapas , first as a human rights activist in peace camps, and later as a volunteer installing water systems in indigenous rebel villages.

But as he methodically dissects his extensive research and experience in Zapatista communities over the years, Barmeyer's gaze moves from that of a bright-eyed solidarity activist to that of a cold and critical anthropological student, thus ensuring a rigid, unsparing and often scathing appraisal of his subjects.

"Even fifteen years after the uprising [of 1994]," writes Barmeyer, "there is a great gap between the impression that the rebels have managed to create among a worldwide sympathetic audience and the realities on the ground."

But Barmeyer's experience is not simply the familiar narrative of a white European going to a foreign land in search of the exotic other, and finding only disillusionment and disenchantment with the reality there. His is a careful study of a revolutionary initiative and its repercussions, specifically the problem of reconciling the language and posture of the actors (local, national and international) and the actual situation.

"It struck me that in its portrayal of social organization in the communities under its control," writes Barmeyer, "the EZLN readily catered for utopian visions so cherished by their sympathizers around the globe. Accounts from rebel villages were rather vague, leaving it up to readers to fill in the gaps with their own favored images; poetic fiction characteristic for Marcos communiques has usually prevailed over concrete and self-critical assessments of the situation on the ground."

It is this proliferation of idealized images that Barmeyer deconstructs in this work. His focus is on the space between the actual Zapatista communities and the indigenous culture as he experiences and sees them, and the imagined and illusionary notion of the rebel movement. These idealized images are, he posits, forged in the writings of Zapatista spokesperson Subcommander Marcos, and reproduced by solidarity groups and NGO organizations working in the region. The result is "rosy portrayals" that are "stunningly uncritical" in their analysis, presenting an image that reflects more what the people outside want to hear than the reality on the ground.

What kind of idealized images is he taking aim at? Taking a closer look at the much-feted workings of Zapatista governance—generally understood as an extension of a deeply rooted egalitarian indigenous culture and a good example of the 'horizontalist' model of organizing—Barmeyer describes how decision-making structures are, in practice, less a model of grassroots participatory democracy than a process often dominated by men, older community members and those who can dispense patronage.

"Autonomous administrative structures and the way today's rebel municipalities are run have little to do with Mayan heritage but are actually a hodgepodge of practices ranging from the Catholic cult of village saints imposed by the Spanish crown to the ejidal administration structures laid down in Mexico's Agrarian Law and organizational elements introduced by cataquistas (lay preachers) and Maoist students in the 1970's," writes Barmeyer.

It could also be argued that any kind of emancipatory democracy that emerges from such authoritarian roots should be commended. While the notion of Zapatista horizontal democracy seems more aspirational than actual, the reality is that within the Zapatista movement there is a constant struggle between the old forms of exercising power and new, emancipatory ones. The inclusion of more women and youth in the decision-making process is, as Barmeyer points out, evidence of a shifting paradigm.

'Never Trust a Peasant'

Next, Barmeyer takes to task the common misconception that the Zapatistas are made up of a uniform mass of dispossessed indigenous peasants perpetually up in arms against the outside oppressor. On the contrary, the EZLN and its base of support are composed of a small, hardcore base of adherents with a larger fluctuating support base among the widerChiapas population. Barmeyer dwells a lot on the problem of shifting allegiances within the indigenous communities, suggesting that there is a fundamental lack of political or ideological commitment among the base. Ultimately, it is an economic imperative that draws impoverishedcampesinos to the rebel organization and the same motive that cause them to leave and assume a pro-government position.

"Frequent shifts of affiliation among the inhabitants of the Selva Lacandona and Las Canadas [Zapatista strongholds] confirm that they are pragmatic planners of their fate, willing to throw their lot with whomever they trust to help them along the way to fulfilling their aspirations."

Coincidentally, Barmeyer's observations call to mind Lenin's infamous words - 'never trust a peasant' - questioning the revolutionary potential of the rural proletariat.

In one particularly stark passage, the author returns to a former Zapatista community and probes the residents on their reasons for desertion. Ex-Zapatista Lorena blames the ongoing level of poverty suffered by the villagers, for although she "approved of what Marcos had done and continued to do, she also said that, in her view, the EZLN had never really delivered anything of what was needed in the community." The government on the other hand, she points out, " might only give a little bit, but at least they give something."

But while the Mexican government's ongoing counter-insurgency strategy of buying off individuals or whole communities has certainly inflicted a lot of damage to the EZLN, it has not defeated them. It seems remarkable that despite the obvious economic hardship that comes with Zapatista affiliation, a sizable hardcore of the Zapatista base remain loyal to the cause. Even fifteen years after the initial uprising, the EZLN can still count on a considerable body of the indigenous population to rally to their call—even if it is a fraction of the amount they could mobilize at the height of their popularity.

This manifestation of ideological steadfastness is recognized by the anthropologist in the final words of his book, granting that a whole new generation of indigenous rebels "particularly among the inhabitants of the new Zapatista settlements where revolutionary practice is part of everyday life, bears witness to the fact that these people are indeed committed to a cause that transcends their own immediate benefit."

Informants and Informers

Academic texts are often turgid to read, and laborious to decipher. Barmeyer's work (conducted in the context of a Ph.D. course) is salvaged by a lively, informative and often witty tone of narration. Caught between his activist and academic caps, he is mischievous in his descriptions, as his friends become 'informants' (informers some would say), while his home in San Cristobal where he invites Zapatistas to stay, his 'center of research.' He befriends one local Zapatista—Cipriano, a self-described wild rover—and he and his extended family become the ongoing object of Barmeyer's research. Therein lies the dubious academic practice of befriending people on the ground to study them.

Early in the book, Barmeyer describes how one local NGO operative refused to allow him to participate in their particular solidarity project because he was an anthropologist. How could this kind of anthropological research benefit the communities, asks the solidarity worker, arguing that a publication ofBarmeyer's findings could only help the Zapatista's enemies. Indeed, in the midst of ongoing low-intensity warfare, it doesn't seem overtly paranoid to think that military intelligence and other counter-insurgency elements are not using this kind of insider information for their own ends. It is a moot point, never fully answered byBarmeyer. Perhaps by replacing one´s activist cap with an academic cap, one can distance oneself sufficiently from such moral dilemma's.

But it can also be argued that an extensive and thorough investigation into the failures of the Zapatista movement, such as Barmeyer's work, can strengthen and consolidate the movement. Despite its' stinging critique, Developing Zapatista Autonomy is a work that portends not so much to undermine the validity of the rebel project, but, at its base, to dispense with idealized or imagined images. Instead of harboring untenable illusions or offering unconditional solidarity for revolutionary groups, Barmeyer's work allows Zapatista supporters an opportunity for reflection on the development of the Zapatista project for autonomy so far.

Finally, it should be remembered to put things into perspective. As Mexico slides deeper into crisis with an illegitimate government implementing increasingly discreditedneo -liberal policies and relying on the military to deal with pressing social and political conflict, it would seem the need for an emancipatory Zapatista movement is desirable and indeed necessary now more than ever. In that wider context, the criticisms emphasized in Developing Zapatista Autonomy may seem like nitpicking, without giving enough credit for the impressive achievements of the rebel organization.

As Marcos pointed out (in one of his possibly less romantic and idealized comments), "We are not trying to make an orthodox revolution, but something much more difficult: a revolution which makes possible the revolution."

2009-03-17T22:15:00.000-07:00

Mapping Controversy in Oaxaca: Interview with Aldo Gonzalez, Indigenous Rights Officer of UNOSJO
Written by Ramor Ryan, Upsidedown World
Thursday, 12 March 2009

Zapotec leader calls for withdrawal of US military funded mapping project from rural Oaxaca communities, accusing geographers of counter-insurgency activities.

When the Union of Social Organizations of the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca (UNOSJO) released a press statement last January denouncing the Mexico Indigena / Bowman Expeditions extensive geographical project to produce maps of the “digital human terrain” of Zapotec communities, they had little idea the storm it would create across the globe. Charging the US geographers with lack of full disclosure with regard to the funding received from the US Military Foreign Military Studies Office (FMSO), UNOSJO claimed that the Zapotec participants felt like “they had been the victims of an act of geo-piracy”.

Following sensational headlines in local Oaxaca newspapers, the story was taken up at a national and international level, from Mexico to Moscow to Seoul. Although hardly meriting a mention in the US media, the controversy did however ignite fury in the blogsphere, and on English language listservs and websites. While raising significant questions regarding research ethics and academic collaboration with the military in the US, the crucial issue at hand in Mexico remains US interference in the region, by conducting an intelligence-driven mapping project focusing on both counterinsurgency and bio-piracy. Taking into account the 2006 Uprising in Oaxaca that almost overthrew its incumbent governor as well as the existence of armed insurgent groups in the state, Oaxaca does lend itself as a staging ground for focusing on what the US Foreign Military Studies Office calls “emerging and asymmetric threats”.

The Mexico Indigena project leader Peter Herlihy completely denies all accusations and reasserts his team’s “abiding dedication to the indigenous people of Oaxaca and our neutrality in all things political.” Bowman Expeditions leader Professor Jerome Dobson, however, defends the military connection and what he believes is the role for his particular academic discipline in government affairs - “My whole rationale for Bowman Expeditions is based on my firm belief that geographic ignorance is the principal cause of the blunders that have characterized American foreign policy since the end of World War II," wrote Dobson in his Feb. 5 statement answering his critics. “America abandoned geography after World War 2 and hasn't won a war since."

Upside Down World spoke to Aldo Gonzalez recently at the Zapotecs' 3rd Feria of the Cornfield- Globalization and the Natural Resources of the Sierra - convened by the UNOSJO coordination at the rural indigenous town of Asuncion Lachixila, where representatives of UNOSJO's 24 affiliated communities gathered to celebrate Zapotec autonomy and discuss the mapping controversy.

UDW: Bowman Expeditions say that UNOSJO have no authority to speak for the two individual Zapotec communities in question who accepted the Mexico Indigena study. “Does Aldo Gonzalez legally or politically represent the people of the rural villages where we work?” asks Professor Dobson, answering himself - “ No. He is simply the director of a small NGO called UNOSJO”. What is your response?

Aldo Gonzalez : Mr Herlihy and Mr Dobson --and indeed the US military-- are used to speaking to individuals. For them it is sufficient to ask one person as the owner of a piece of land for permission. But for the indigenous communities things aren’t like that. Today we are struggling for the autonomy for our indigenous peoples, and this is a project bigger than any one single community. So what is happening in Tiltepec and Yagila is affecting other Zapotec communities. For this reason, we have the courage, the duty and the reason to protest against Bowman Expeditions because it is not just the communities of Tiltepec or Yagila, but all the communities in that region, all the Zapotec communities, and indeed, ultimately, all of the indigenous communities in Mexico who are being or will be affected by the studies.

So in some sense, this conflict is about the clash of two visions of life that are very different. This one, the project of the indigenous communities, is collective, and theirs – which is the one that the US government wants – is to individualize. Bowman Expeditions clearly state that in this mapping project they are collecting information so that the US government can make better foreign policy decisions. So obviously they are going to take into consideration the information gathered here in these communities and apply it in general to all the communities in similar circumstances in Oaxaca and all over Mexico.

By not really revealing their intentions, by not revealing the sources of their funding, by not giving all the information, Mexico Indigena are violating the communities. They are concealing the truth, they are lying. The two communities who decided to accept the Bowman study did so without being fully informed. ”

UDW: Project leaders Professors' Herlihy and Dobson say that the project doesn’t present any danger whatsoever for the communities being mapped. On the contrary they say that they are helping the communities, and those in other regions of Mexico like San Luis Potosi - where they oversaw another mapping project - saying their study helps communities counter land privatization schemes.

AG: Well they would say that, wouldn’t they! But it's not true. UNOSJO has been revealing how Dobson, or better said, the US military authorities who are behind project, are very interested in seeing that indigenous land be privatized, individually.

So when they are doing their studies in indigenous communities we can clearly see that, for example in San Luis Potosi the community lands that were studied there were communally held land, ejidos, and PROCEDE -- the government privatization scheme of communally held land -- entered into practically all the states’ ejidos. The question is different in Oaxaca, where the communal land fall under different ownership laws as they are called agrarian communities, not ejidos, so they can't be so easily privatized, and what's more, the majority of the communities in Oaxaca didn’t participate in the PROCEDE scheme. So for sure, the geographers and the US military are interested to know more about why the indigenous communities resisted that government program and seem intent of disrupting the process of privatization. Well of course, its very clear to us here why we didn’t take part in PROCEDE, but they don’t understand why. In the United States, private property is everything, but for the indigenous communities in Mexico, property is something different entirely. We don’t want to privatize our communities. Nor do we want that the land of one ejido be sold. Today our agrarian communities’ lands can't be sold by law, but they can be converted into ejidos, and thus under ejido law, they may be privatized through PROCEDE, divided up and sold individually. We don’t want this to happen, but we think they, the FMSO and their people are interested in seeing this process of selling off the land. So during their mapping investigations, they are seeking to identify some kind of mechanism or some kind of way of obliging or forcing the communities to join the PROCEDE program.

UDW: Why are the US Army Foreign Military Studies Office interested specifically in the Zapotec?

AG: Principally they are overseeing their studies with a view to counterinsurgency, but not only this. Also - ever since Vietnam – they have adopted the strategy of attempting to convince or win over the hearts and minds of the people who oppose them. They do this by offering little gifts, crumbs as such, so it is said that the wars of the US are to win over the hearts and minds of the people they are trying to subjugate - and we think you can include the resistance of the Zapotec in that category.

So, its not just about military control, but also about strategic control over the communities, controlling their land and their consumption.

UDW: How do you view the current situation?

AG: We have been talking to the communities involved in the US studies and they maintain that they were not sufficiently informed about the source of finance and they feel angry because of this. For sure the Herlihy team will try and go to them to change their minds and convince them otherwise, and that will generate more debate. Nevertheless, we must point out that this debate doesn’t only include the two places where they did the studies. There are other Zapotec communities affected by the situation and they must be included in the debate too.

Look out for the April Edition of Z Magazine, where Upside Down World Editor Cyril Mychalejko and Ramor Ryan provide an comprehensive article on The Bowman Expeditions' Mexico Indigena Project and the controversy surrounding it.

Link for the press conference:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ulIx0_Uw7vg

Interview with Melchiades:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBctrVBQ2g4&feature=channel

Zapatista Spring

2008-06-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

Zapatista Spring

2008-06-10T18:08:00.000-07:00

Autonomy and a Song.

Zapatista Spring

2008-06-10T16:53:00.000-07:00

Building a new world.

Anti-Ulises : A Day in the Life of a Simmering City

2008-06-06T16:57:00.000-07:00

by Ramor Ryan, 13 May 2008
From Upsidedownworld.com
The Epic Struggle for Another Oaxaca Has Not Finished, says David Venegas.

"History is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake." - Stephen Daedalus, in Ulysses, James Joyce 1922

Oaxaca City, Mexico, May 15 - Midnight in Oaxaca, and walking around the historic center, it's almost as if nothing had ever happened here. The bourgeoisie sit around under the colonial arches in the long stretch of French-style outdoor cafes lining the central plaza. Aside from being beset by a small army of ambulant trinket vendors and beggars, the well-heeled citizens sipping cappuccinos seem very at ease with the world. A few late night tourists wander about the pleasant old streets under the starry sky, and the industrious hum of the sultry cosmopolitan city invokes an eternal calm.

It's as if there had never been a riotous peoples' insurrection in these same streets just two years ago. As if the rebel citizenry had never erected one thousand and one barricades to defend their city from the marauding police forces of the despised and despotic state government. And as if the tens of thousands of rebels and insurrectionists had not been this close to winning the great battle for Oaxaca in the heady summer days and nights at the barricades of 2006. The famous subversive graffiti that painted the whole town red and black is removed, whitewashed, as is the blood in the streets of the 26 fallen comrades shot down by the police and state paramilitaries.

“Since all of this, we will not be the same at all as before; we can’t be and we don’t want to be,” said a resident shortly after the quelled uprising.

But at this moment, to a visitor just having stepped off the bus from Chiapas, the strange normality of the place gives the appearance that everything has not changed, that everything remains the same in Oaxaca as it was before the uprising.

Sometimes hope comes from the most unexpected quarters. Walking away from the sanitized Zocalo, we chance upon a moribund vista. Shuffling around in the half shadows of a street corner, about a hundred tooled-up riot cops loiter with menace - as if itching for something to happen. The phalanx of troops, an ominous dark mass of helmets, riot shields and shiny black boots, clank their long metal sticks on the somewhat medieval flagstones. It is an incongruous sight at this time of night, amidst this placid ambiance, without the slightest disturbance to be ascertained of any kind anywhere.

Paradoxically, their presence signifies a welcome sign - where there are riot police there is generally trouble, and trouble in the Oaxaca context, means...resistance.

I have followed the movements of police riot squads with close interest for many years. So I approach the last cop in the line – a young indigenous man clad in state-of-the-art modern armor – and with all the sweet innocence of a visiting tourist ask him as to why they are here.

"Is there a problem, officer?" I ask.

He tenses up, grips his metal baton and stares at the distant wall, not at me.

“We are here for your protection” he says sternly - and somewhat comically.

We have heard that one before. Back in the day, during the war in Ireland, this is how the occupying British troops behaved - nervous, uncertain and trigger-happy. So this is it - as people had forewarned - this tremulous peace in the city is one overseen by riot cops lingering in the shadows. Oaxaca is a city under stealthy occupation.

The March of the Umbrellas

Around midday, under the glare of the blazing tropical sun, some 50,000 protesting teachers start flooding into downtown Oaxaca. Today, May 15 is Teachers Day, and the states educators have downed chalk on-mass, and declared a strike as they have done religiously every year for the last 25 years.

It's a remarkable sight, the arrival of the teacher hordes. Teachers anywhere in the world are a most innocuous bunch of people, and the members of this particular branch of the national teachers union, known as Section 22, are the most unlikely street revolutionaries imaginable. Yet these same humble unionists were the solid backbone of the 2006 insurrection. Here they come, this sea of teachers under the midday sun, these revolutionary hordes and... they are not masked up, nor linking arms, nor pumping fists. No, they are strolling along gaily under a roof of colorful bobbing umbrellas, singing songs and being generally full of revelry and joy. Having marched for 3 hours one would expect a certain fatigue, but no, the teachers are boisterous and upbeat and the enticing chaos is more mad hatters tea party than militant discipline.

"The teachers struggling," they sing, "celebrating their day of the teachers!"

But it would be a mistake to underestimate their militant resolve. Maria, an indigenous Zapotec teacher from the isthmus is carrying her one-year-old child Victoria in her arms as she marches.

"Victoria?," I ask.

“Hasta la victoria siempre!” she laughs, towards victory always, quoting Che.

Maria had been part of the uprising in 2006.

“Wow, lots of tear gas and running,” she says, looking back, “but...we almost made it, we almost won.”

"Do you have fear," I ask, "returning here two years later, to Oaxaca city center, after the brutal repression?"

“Not unless I don't have a stone or a stick in my hand to protect myself, no, then I am not afraid,” she says with a laugh, this 20-something-year-old mother who defines herself as "a Christian teacher".

From the central platform on the kiosk in the Zocalo, the teacher's leaders spell out their demands for higher salaries, increased funding for rural schools and the resignation of the state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz.

“We wont negotiate with the government of Ulises,” says Domingo Cabera, secretary general of the Section 22 of the Teachers Union, “ because we don't recognize the legitimacy of his government, we will only negotiate with the federal government.”

“Here today with this massive turnout,” says the speaker, “we demonstrate that the movement is more consolidated than ever.”

Sort of. It's common knowledge that Section 22 of the Teacher Union is in a state of disarray. Maria, the rural teacher, doesn't trust the words or intentions of her union leadership.

“While striking teachers were selling their cars and their houses in 2006 to support the strike, the corrupt leaders were accepting bribes and selling out the grassroots,” she tells me.“It is a tragedy, but now we are re-organizing.”

Flavio Sosa takes the microphone and it is a significant moment. Recently released from jail, he is one of the most recognized figures of the Oaxaca Peoples Popular Assembly (APPO). As the organizing body of the uprising, APPO brought together a myriad of social and political groupings and could mobilize hundreds of thousands at the height of the rebellion. Flavio is of the faction of the APPO state council who favors negotiation with the authorities and political participation in state and municipal elections - a very contentious issue within the rebel movement.

“We demand the release the remaining political prisoners,” says Flavio over the microphone, outlining the political demands of the movement, “[and] the cancellation of the outstanding arrest warrants (several hundred), punishment for those responsible for the deadly repression committed during 2006 and the resignation of state governor Ulises Ruiz Ortiz. Fuera Ulises - Ulises out!”

Ulises, Ulysses, is a most aptly named tyrant – whom Virgil refers to famously in the Aeneid, as “a cruel and deceitful man”. The much hated latter-day Ulises minor continues to be the focus of the protesters ire. Representing the PRI party who ruled Mexico for 70 years, he was elected in 2004 under very dubious circumstances, and marked the beginning of his tenure with a campaign of brutal repression against his opponents. While previous Governors had negotiated or tolerated the widespread and deeply ingrained opposition movement in Oaxaca, Ulises oversaw the criminalization of protest. But he underestimated the strength and determination of the opposition, who responded with the total takeover of Oaxaca. Exiled for most of 2006, his administration was only able to return after a bloody offensive by some 6,500 militarized cops against APPO on October 29 of that same year- leading to 200 arrests, hundreds hospitalized and the city center resembling a battlefield.

A Cantina Full of Anarchists

We - two Irish visitors - have come to Oaxaca to talk with the comrades from Oaxacan Voices Constructing Autonomy and Freedom (VOCAL), a sizable anti-authoritarian grouping that forms part of APPO. Anarchists and libertarians had played a prominent role in the defense of the city in 2006, and remain an important voice in the movement. In a traditional cantina, a group of grassroots teachers and Vocal-istas engage in a the post-march analysis.

A big march somewhat empty of content, appears to be the general agreement.

We meet with David Venegas Reyes, a 25-year-old local resident who emerged as one of the more charismatic and articulate young voices on the street in 2006. For his trouble, the state issued an arrest warrant and in April 2007 he was abducted from a city park, and thrown in jail. After a campaign for his release, in which even Amnesty International voiced concern for the manner of his detention, he walked in February 2007, all charges dropped.

“On the one hand here in the city,” explains David, “the government has been able to partially dismantle the Section 22 which was the largest of the unions and the center of the movement in 2006. But at the same time there is a lot of discontent in the ranks, and the leadership has been totally discredited by the base. So while the government has managed to corrupt the union leadership by buying them off, the base has become more conscientious and is therefore more difficult to cheat or hoodwink.”

First off, David is not a leader, nor a spokesperson for VOCAL. But it seems by general consensus of the various Vocal-istas here, that he will be the one to talk to us visitors - maybe because he is the affable and chatty one of the group.

The owner of the cantina overhears the table talk, and voicing support for the teachers and APPO, sends over a round of beers. I am impressed by how open and conspicuous are the activists despite the general atmosphere of repression in the city. Several of the people here have outstanding arrest warrants from 2006 still hanging over their heads, yet this does not stop them going out and joining the protests, or simply going about their lives unbowed.

"What about APPO?," I ask. "Is it affected by the same kind of disarray as the Section 22?"

David responds carefully and comprehensively; I think its worth quoting him at length:

“APPO has basically being the unity of the different organizations of the peoples of Oaxaca. The interesting thing, the transcendental thing about APPO is that it has managed to bring together a broad representation of the various peoples of the state with a wide convergence of different ideologies and visions of the world - all under the one assembly. Then came the great wave of actions that took place in 2006, the great advance towards realizing our collective aspirations - first demanding the exit of Ulises, and much more than that, also demanding a radical and profound change in the society in which we live in .”

“So in 2006 our APPO assemblies reflected the assemblies of the indigenous communities in so much as that there were no leaders and it is the assembly which decides things. We tried to act like this but sadly there was a gap between how we acted in assembly and the verticalism practiced by some of the social organizations. So there was this tension within APPO as how people wanted to organize and how to practice.”

“The spontaneous combative spirit that arose in the streets was not the result of some bureaucratic orders from some leaders up on top; no, they came from the people in the streets themselves, and the spirit remains there.”

“When the brutal repression against us began, the mobilizations weakened, firstly because of fear at the ferocity of the repression. But alongside this, people felt dispirited and demoralized by the opportunistic actions at this critical moment of some of the considered leaders of a few social movements. The important point of this story is that in February 2007, some social movements decided that the movement couldn't achieve the demand of removing Ulises from government and so proposed that APPO make an alliance with the supposed left-wing political parties in Oaxaca and to compete for power in the local municipal and congressional elections. During this discussion, an important group of companeros defined themselves by opposing this proposal and we managed to stop this attempt to institutionalize our movement. And so emerged strong divisions within the movement, provoked mainly by those whose aspirations for taking power were frustrated.”

“So a group of us libertarian companeros and those who didn't believe in political parties and various ideologies, agreed that for the movement to enter into the electoral route was to merely play the states game in this context in Oaxaca and so we opposed it. VOCAL doesn't aspire to become the leadership of APPO. VOCAL is a space of unity for those who think the autonomy of our diverse and multicultural peoples is a political proposal for our reality. We stayed with the APPO because the unity of the people is important. And its important to remain true to the words that were said in 2006 that the APPO is a movement of bases and not of leaders. Although it was said, many did not act like this and began to invest their confidence in false leaders.”

Other voices around the table are more forthright in their criticism of the PRD (opposition political party) and Marxist-type elements which took control of the APPO, but David remains staunchly non-sectarian.

“So there are many of us, not just VOCAL, the Magonistas and some Marxists, but many of the base who believe that we have to re-organize the movement from below, not from the top down. Because the truth is that APPO is in the communities and in the union bases – not just in the leadership. In Mexico there is a long history of leaders becoming compromised – anybody who knows a little of the union history knows how often this has happened – the leadership always becomes compromised, recuperated by power. And the leadership in APPO has similar tendencies.”

So what are the lessons, I ask, that have been taken away from 2006? As in, you almost had it, APPO was in control of the city like a modern day Paris Commune and Ulises was on his way out the door; victory was so close. And then after holding the city for eight long, glorious months, came the huge wave of repression and the movement was beaten off the streets. What went wrong?, I ask.

“There are some who say we made tactical errors in 2006, but I don't think it was an error or mistake to defend our territory in a physical form against the assassins of Ulises and the militarized Federal police of (Presidents) Vincente Fox and Felipe Calderon. For me that was not the error - to defend ourselves , no, the error that was made was when people started to believe in false leaders," said David.

Another comrade chimes into the discussion. “And there are those who say that the movement brought repression upon themselves by upping the ante of resistance, that they got what they deserved! Nonsense!”

“The prisoners and the dead aren't guilty!” says David. “The guilty are those who imprisoned and murdered them."

It's now late afternoon and everyone disperses for various meetings. The political energy is perceivable and the days' march has got people upbeat. The spirit of resistance is simmering once more in the streets of Oaxaca.

Of Police and Streets

Sometime after dusk, we reunite with David under the portal of the great old central Cathedral in the Zocalo. Despite the days events, the police presence in the center is negligible – mostly undercover agents discreetly monitoring the proceedings. The authorities have decided upon a non-aggressive strategy and the city is teeming with teachers in repose. It must be surreal for them to be confronted with this veil of normality in the city they once occupied. One noticeable difference from even the night before is the clandestine presence of graffiti all over the place. The ubiquitous APPO slogans and Fuera Ulises! are back on the walls of the city again.

Walking the darkening city thoroughfare, a police car slowly passes by, and David involuntarily glances over his shoulder. I imagine he has his fears - after all, it was in these very streets that he was suddenly lifted by an undercover snatch squad in broad daylight, and abruptly removed to the nightmare of indefinite incarceration.

“Fear? Yeah,” he says, “of course we have fear. But fear should not impede us from moving forward. People continue to struggle just as they did in 2006 without stepping back, or wobbling. People are coming together again, to make sure that Ulises's assassins or the abductions don't continue."

"I was a prisoner held for 11 months, just a caprice for the authorities. And then I was released for lack of evidence.” he added.

It wasn't that justice was done, more that the pressure from outside meant it was politically untenable for the state to hold him hostage any longer. David recognizes the role national and international solidarity played in his release, and in the struggle in general.

“A really important part in detaining the repression was the level of national and international observation that took place from outside. If this hadn't happened, I think that the repression would have been even much worse.”

“But it shouldn't be thought that suddenly we live in a just state now,” emphasizes David. “We still live under a state of daily repression and harassment. It's unbearable, and we can't have some government telling us that we must accept living under this state of oppression, as if it was some kind of normalcy. We don't accept it, because we are a free people, free we are born and free we were brought up. And since the resistance hasn't stopped, so the repression continues. I think that whatever happens in Oaxaca in the next while it's really important that people from outside don't stop the vigilance, and continue pressurizing the government to limit their use of reactionary violence.”

A new Amnesty International report echoes his concerns, denouncing the repression on the social movement and the general impunity that exists for security forces in the country in general, and the abuse of citizen's rights in Oaxaca in particular.

But this climate of fear engendered by the authorities doesn't stop David traversing these streets which he has known all his life. Indeed, the going is slow as he meets and greets all and sundry along the way – like this middle-aged indigenous man who stops him randomly and wishes him well, knowing of his unjust imprisonment. It's like the movement, even if it doesn't hold the center, still has the street.

We are going to a social center where a bunch of musicians and activists are gathered for a night of Son Jarocho, a traditional popular song and dance. It's an autonomous space, familiar to other cultural and political spaces in different parts of the globe - self-managed, a shebeen of sorts, where people come and go, and the mood is friendly. Between ardent musical performances, people give brief presentations, like this from a representative of the Universidad de la Tierra ( UniTierra), a peoples' university based here in the city. Another is a report back from the caravan of the isthmus region undertaken by a group of VOCAL activists, including David, who returned early this morning. The Trail of the Jaguar political tour of the rural isthmus consolidated links with indigenous communities under the theme “for the regeneration of our collective memory”.

In a quiet moment we drag David away for the gathering and continue with our interrogation. On the flat roof of the social center, the city stretches out far and wide, the lights shimmering across the vast valley. Oaxaca is a much bigger place than it seems when wandering around the historic center.

"What's going on with the movement in the city, and in the countryside," I ask, "Where do we stand now?"

“Here in the city, there has been a strong militarization and a heavy police presence to repress the movement. Meanwhile the government has somewhat ignored the indigenous communities and it is there, in the rural community that some very important organizing is happening. I'm not saying that the movement in the city has finished and now the movement is only in the countryside, no. It is more that the government, while focusing all their attention on defeating the movement in the city, has allowed discontent to flourish in the countryside,” says David.

While of course simultaneously letting the paramilitaries have a free hand to do their dirty work in the communities – including the April ambush murder of two women journalists working for La Voz que Rompe el Silencio (“The Voice that Breaks the Silence”), a community radio station serving the Trique indigenous community. But the kind of police and military saturation within the City has not occurred in the communities.

“And so today in Oaxaca City there is a tense calm. The councilors and officials of the APPO and Section 22 leadership are being conciliatory and opportunistic. Groups of Stalinists and PRD-istas of the electoral persuasion are making a pact with the business leaders to get permission to mobilize. But the others, like us in VOCAL and other groups, the majority of the movement, are in constant confrontation with the authorities because our mobilizations are not seen gladly by the state - and the line between repression and tolerance is barely visible,” says David.

A Oaxaca Commune

The Son Jarocho session is wrapping up and people are homeward bound. We pile into a van going out to the outskirts of town where a bunch of people are staying. There's about a dozen of us in this beat up van, rattling along the highway out of town. There's a certain spirit of abandonment about these people and its contagious. I'm thinking if the cops stop this thing, they will net a good dirty dozen desperadoes of veteran anarchists.

The van arrives at a feral warehouse on a sprawling lot, cluttered with machines, tools and a big old bus just back from the Trail of the Jaguar tour. The collective living space is populated by a group of weary and sonambulant activists. A tattered, faded image of the Virgin of the Barricades adorns a wall, the ironic patron saint who presided over those at the barricades in 2006. Her image, with her iconic gas mask and cloak of burning tires reminds me of Calamidad's words, the last gringa on the last barricade on the last night of the Oaxaca commune.

"A lot of people have been fucked in the head ever since November 25, 2006, " she lamented, "when it was all lost in a flurry of bullets--but damn was it a close fight for awhile. In a sense people are just as traumatized by the tragic implications of what victory might have been- and how close people were to it, so close they could taste it for the first time in their lives- as they were by the violence. When I returned to Oaxaca, I would walk into a party, and comrades would come up to me and say - 'she remembers! We almost did it, we had the city! All the barricades! The city was ours!' So its not only the repression that people remember, but also the memory of holding the streets for so long is a bitter one.....because they lost them."

Here in this chaotic, creative space, among the barricadistas who have not given up, there is a palpable feeling that, despite the loss in 2006, there is still hope and people are now organizing harder than ever.

“And,” David Venegas reminds us, “as the Mexican saying goes - 'There is no evil that can last a hundred years, and there's no body that can't resist it', meaning that everything has its own time, and this straight-jacket of a state has come to its end. That the time has come.”

Up and down the country people are invoking the centennial memory of the first Mexican revolution – 1910 - to herald a new revolution in 2010. "What's the feeling here," I ask David, "about this quasi-mystical belief in revolutionary change on a sanctified date?"

“Well many Mexicans are resigned to the fatality of the idea of 2010,” he says with a smile, “ and as you know, Mexico is profound and millenarian. But for me, its not important that the deed happens on this very date, but more importantly that it occurs! And I can feel it in the air in Mexico - a longing for revolution. But revolutions don't just occur on a certain date - they are prepared. And what I'm seeing is an growing insurgent spirit, alongside an increase in the brutality of the government. There is a great indignation felt by the communities and movements against whom the bad government has declared war.”

“I hope a revolutionary change occurs in this country because there can be no half solutions, reforms are not going to end the injustice and exploitation. A change from the bottom is necessary, a profound and truthful change. This is what millions are demanding, and this is what the government are trying to deny us. The government has failed to reform the state constitutionally, to comply to our aspirations. That is why it is we, the people who must make those changes – because the government has lost its opportunity. So now its our responsibility to make those changes.”

It's midnight once more in Oaxaca, and this long plenteous day, May 15, 2008, is over. We bed down in the loft cosy with about 20 other companeras and companeros and dreams come easily. History is a nightmare from which Oaxaca, like Mexico, is trying to wake up from and maybe 2006 was just a primer.

The Last Rebels of the the Caribbean

2008-03-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

Garifuna Fighting For Their Lives

by Ramor Ryan from Upsidedownworld.org >

They hang the man, and flog the woman,
That steals the goose from off the common;But let the greater villain loose,
That steals the common from the goose.
-Anonymous protest poem from the 17th century

Enclosing the commons – the historical process of fencing off land which had previously been in the public domain, for private use – is perhaps one of the most blatant expressions of the fundamental criminal nature of the capitalist state. Today it's the voracious neo-liberal model which stalks the last pockets of community-held global territory for privatization - from Chiapas, Mexico, to the deep Amazon, to the Garifuna coast of Honduras, leaving no stone unturned.

"We have hundreds of kilometers of beaches that aren't developed, and it's a waste,'' said the then Honduran Tourism Secretary, Ana Abarca in 2001. "We want strong tourism. We are going after the sun and the beach."

While the neo-liberal government sees unproductive beaches and waste, other people see living communities existing in harmony with their surroundings. These hundreds of kilometers of "waste" are home to 76 Garifuna villages, where people live as they have for a couple of hundred years, reliant on the sea for fishing, on the beach for coconut and fruit, on the wetlands for rice cultivation and the surrounding hillsides for growing manioc, yucca, firewood, and hunting. Their simple wooden homes are built along the beaches, or on stilts above the waves. Men fish from dugout canoes or dive with spears along the reefs.

Ironically, it is the Garifuna communities' two most salient attributes – the simple beauty of their territory, and the uniqueness of their vibrant culture – that pose a threat to their existence. The former coveted by the tourist industry because of the pristine nature, the latter commodified, spearheaded by the commercialization of the mesmerizing Punta music and dance, as exotic eye-candy for the tourists.

"We dont want the mega tourist industry here," says Miriam Miranda, executive committee member of OFRANEH (Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras), the most prominent organization representing the Garifuna people. "Why do these people come to take our resources? They are not welcome."

So despite UNESCO declaring Garifuna culture one of nineteen Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001, the problem for the neo-liberals is that the land is unproductive, and the people superannuated. The assault on the Garifuna culture and way of life on the northern coast of Honduras by a powerful cabal of government ministers and foreign investors, overseen in the name of economic developement, seems too shockingly philistine to contemplate, and somewhat akin to the Taliban destruction of the Bamiyam Buddah statues, formerly declared as another of UNESCO's cultural heritages of humanity. But such is fundamentalist nature of neo-liberal capitalist ideology: profit before people driven by naked greed.

And balanced with that rapacity is the dignity of the Garifuna resistance to the privatization of their ancestral lands. This is a struggle with fable-like, epic qualities, of heroes and villains, theft and floggings and, well if not quite geese, at least sharks. But talk to Garifuna community leader Alfredo Lopez for 5 minutes and it becomes clear that any attempts to romanticize the cut-throat struggle is incongruous. He will talk of the brutal repression, the murders, the prisoners, of an venerable culture against the wall, of a proud people facing extinction. "All this privatization is illegal, and if it continues - we are going to die as a people." says Alfredo, standing before the breathtaking Bay of Tela – the disputed territory coveted by the lascivious conglomerate of tourist industry transnationals. "To lose our land, is to lose everything. We are in a struggle for our life and we will do what it takes to defend ourselves."

Dispossessed, Marooned, Marginalized : Resistance Blossoms

The quintessential banana republic, Honduras remains after Haiti the second poorest country in the hemisphere. The Central American staples of chronic insecurity, massive migration and economic precariousness bedevil the country. And in a nation saturated by Pepsi Cola culture, McDonalds, shopping malls, and all things tacky USA bent on homogenizing everything into consumer conformity, the Garifuna stand out as fantastically different.

About 100,000 Garifuna live in small fishing communities hugging the Caribbean coast, speaking their own Igñeri dialect which is a combination of Arahuaco, Swahili, and Bantu.

Theirs is a vibrant living culture born of an utterly unique history. Between 1640 and 1670, two slave ships coming from West Africa ran aground of the tiny island of St. Vincent, in the lesser Antilles. So began the story of the people who came to be known as the Garifuna - born of a shipwreck, and never enslaved. Their fate should have been to labor to death on the colonizers’ cotton and cane plantations, but instead they find themselves - a couple of hundred castaways - on a tropical island populated by a hostile indigenous population known as the Red Caribs. This is character building stuff for sure.

The Red Caribs rescued the shipwrecked but any goodwill ended there. The indigenous attempted to enslave the newcomers and the Africans, as was to become characteristic of them, resisted. The Africans retreated to the western mountains of the island, forming a Maroon community that in time, was sought out by other runaway slaves and fugitives. So a liberated territory was consecrated and a kind of pirate utopia blossomed, an anti-capitalist autonomous zone in the age of seventeenth century capitalist expansionism. Conflict with the Red Caribs was constant and occasionally brutal, but somewhere along the line love (or maybe just cupid) overcame differences and the flowering of the union became known as " karibena galibina" - child of the Caribe, indigenous galibi - a name which underwent some morphological fine tuning until eventually becoming Garifuna. (British colonialists who had trouble with the preponderance of foreign names confronting them as they plundered about the region just called them Black Caribs.)

Resistance was the leitmotif of this Maroon community. At the dawn of the 18th century, the Red Caribs sought support from the French to defeat them. But using intrepid guerrilla tactics, the Garifuna fought the French forces back. The sword failed, but the cross had more success, and missionaries were able to penetrate the communities. But as the Garifuna converted, their spiritual resistance was to retain their African gods within the catholic paradigm: this syncretistic religion remained, not imposed, but their own.

At the dearth of the 18th century, they fought the next colonizing force – the British - to stand-still. Facing annihilation from the sole superpower of its day, the British Empire, the Garifuna negotiated and underwent a forced deportation. Exodus brought them to the uninhabited island of Roatan off the coast of Honduras. Many died at sea, but against all odds, the rebellious Garifuna survived once more.

This ethnic group that should have been killed off a few times already in their brief 100 or so years of struggle, now found a little space to work in with the regional colonial masters - the Spanish. Thriving on Roatan, (we like to have lots of children, Alfredo Lopez will tell you 200 years later) the Garifuna spread out along the Honduras coast, eventually encompassing the Caribbean coast lines of Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize. There they intermingled uneasily with the indigenous inhabitants and always keeping their ethical and cultural identity intact. But they remained as ever, marginalized, independent and rebellious in their little autonomous enclaves.

"Going After the Sun and Beach" - the Enclosure of the Commons

Tela Bay and its environs is the center of the Honduran Garifuna world, with some 36 communities dotted along an impressive 80km sandy shore. The largest of them, Triunfo de la Cruz, population 800 families, is a quiet, unassuming village that now finds itself on the front line of the conflict. The first thing the visitor may notice about the Triunfo de la Cruz beachfront is what is lacking. Unusual for a paradise vista like this - a sweeping sun-drenched bay with lush sands and majestic palms. There is no line of beachfront hotels, no bars, no reclining tourists in bikinis sipping margaritas, no uniformed attendants sweeping up the ocean debris. Instead there is a group of hardy fishermen dragging their small old boats from the sea, there are gaggles of raggedy children playing games and and there is an intriguing, languorous feel to the place. It’s a though nothing has changed much here on the beach at Triunfo de la Cruz for a couple of centuries, and people like it that way.

Traditionally the Garifuna holds their land communally, as part of the patrimony of the people in general. The community assembly gathers to decide upon whatever happens in the territory. It is an autonomous zone as such, where the authority is the people’s assembly, and sovereignty lies not in the Honduran state, but with the Garifuna as a whole. Marginalized and isolated, this arrangement worked fine without interruption for some two hundred years, partly due to the isolation of the coast and the marginalization of the community from Honduras. Nobody else wanted to live in such a wild and remote region, so they were left alone.

Sensing encroaching danger and exhibiting not a little premonition, in 1992 the Garifuna achieved legal recognition in the courts for their communally-held land, after decades of struggle. They could rest easy, it seemed.

In 1994, the cabal of powerful business interests made their move. They imagined a Honduran-version of Cancun, bringing in the state and investors bags of money. Locals looked on aghast as suddenly a big fence went up on the beach at Triunfo in 1994 and the building of luxury villas commenced. The fact that it was a completely illegal move presented no difficulties for the developers: they got their buddies in government to change the laws. A privatization bill was introduced, rendering the communally-held land titles of the Garifuna useless. The criminal nature of the state is always the most apparent when it comes to the question of enclosing the commons. As the Tourist Minister emphasized, they were "going after the sun and the beach" and the legal annexation of community-owned lands began with impunity.

They hadn't counted on the fierce refusal of the Garifuna to accomodate these plans. Organized in the Land Defense Comittee of Triunfo de la Cruz (CODETT) the locals resisted, focusing on the unscrupulous malfeasance of the regional state authorities who in the process of fencing off the land had granted erroneous title deeds to the investors. CODETT accused the Tela Municipality authorities of abuse of authority and embezzlement of public funds.

The assault on the Garifuna came swift. Upon signing the lawsuit in 1997, three Garifuna leaders in Triunfo met violent deaths. First, activist Oscar Bregal was murdered leaving the community on January 7. Next, CODETT leader Jesus Alvarez was shot dead on April 7 while he ate with his small son in the nearby town of Tela. This was the third murder attempt on Jesus. Then later, two gunmen entered the home of Santos Zacarias Santos and shot him 17 times in front of his children. Unsurprisingly, Honduran police have not resolved any of these cases – quite possibly because they themselves are among the lead suspects.

Another prominent activist Alfredo Lopez was taken out by legal means – framed and imprisoned for trumped up drug charges. He was jailed for 7 years.

Repression is nothing new for the Garifunas. The OFRANEH organization ( Honduras Black Fraternal Organization) formed in the 1970s to defend the interests of the people and protect their communally-held ancestral land, has been the constant target of state repression. Its members’ houses have been searched, and the members themselves have been illegally detained, surveiled and harrassed. This systematic assault on the organization continues unabated. The last deadly assualt was aimed at the OFRANEH president Gregoria Flores who suffered gunshot wounds while walking down the street in nearby La Ceiba town.

The best way to combat repression is to respond with lightning action. OFRANEHs base of support is predominantly amongst women of the communities, and it was the women who responded with direct action against the first tourist project, occupying the site, and building their own form of alternative community based eco-tourist cabins alongside the stalled resort construction site. "With the force of Barauda and Satuye, our resistance continues!" proclaimed the Garifuna, winning this round of the fight.

The Long Struggle

But the reach of power and money is long. While the various legal petitions to stop the usurpation of the land went through national and international courts at a painfully slow pace, the state and investors were garnering support for their mega-tourist resort plans from high capital – the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, while at the same time wearing away at community resistance. By the time Alfredo Lopez was released from jail, having won his case before the Inter-American Human Rights Commission in 2003, the struggle had almost spanned a decade. By means of another unscrupulous legal connivance called the Area Under Special Management (ABRE) edict, the Government decreed Tela Bay a kind of officially denominated developers playground. The new property law was yet another attempt to break up the Garifunas collective titles, increasing pressure on individual owners to sell their newly acquired property titles. In the small impoverished Garifuna community of Miami, a remote beachside paradise, most residents eventually succumbed to the pressure, and sold their individual land plots, opening the way up to the investors. The coercion was accompanied by veiled threats. As Garifuna leader Edgardo Benedeth pointed out: "The Miami residents think that if they don't sell the land, it will be stolen anyway".

The multi-million dollar Los Micos Beach and Golf Resort affected not only the beach but also the wetlands behind Tela Bay upon which the Garifuna depend for their livelihood. Community water supplies were heavily impacted by the hotel and golf course. "We dont play golf!" laughs Alfredo Lopez, pointing out the absurdity of putting an extravagant golf course on Garifuna land. Confronted by the heavily guarded new enclosures appearing along the beach, Alfredo comments, "We are not used to living with fences or to walk among armed security personnel. They block access to the beach and local tourism is affected. What kind of development is this that only benefits the businessmen and the owners of the projects and goes against the culture and ways of the communities?"

Not even the promised jobs for the locals materialized. "They talk of employment," points out the Garifuna organization OFRANEH, "but the reality is that the hotel chains won’t give us work, they bring workers from outside."

Still the government harked on about bringing wealth and developing the communities through the investment projects.

"According to what we have seen in the past, the reality is completely different, " argued OFRANEH. "We believe that the development has to come from inside and not from outside, and that is why already we have experiences of common and traditional tourism that the local communities are developing. So that gives us the firmness and the moral authority to say that it is not true. There can’t be development if these people force the communities to give up their property."

Employing the ever effective tactic of divide and rule, the government and investors are using money and influence to pressure, bully and buy allegiance. Some sectors of the Garifuna have given in and take the government view that the development of mega-tourism is an inevitability that can't be fought. "This is going to happen, the question is how to prepare,'' says Natividad Rochez, the Tourism Ministry's coordinator of ethnic projects and himself a Garifuna. Government friendly Garifuna NGO's are popping up, ostensibly representing locals, but in reality, payrolled by big business. The states battle for hearts and minds is fought village by village, house by house and generally negotiated through the wallet.

But resistance continues. The Garifuna will tell you a story of the origins of their famous Punta dance. The world renowned music and dance form grew from a war dance called the Yancunu. Back in the day of resistance to the colonialists, Garifuna men donned colorful masks, dressed up as women, danced salaciously before the conquistador foe and at the least expected moment, would whip out the weapons hidden among their many skirts to do battle. The struggle today takes on less extravagant tactics: in the form of legal suits before national and international courts, or mass marches on the Capital, mobilizing popular support. Yet the cunning and passion remains the same. In Tela Bay, roads are blocked and construction of the hotels sabotaged. Resistance is both collective and individual, like the single old lady who refuses to budge in the center of the development at Miami village, forcing them to build their mega complex around her little hut.

The Face of Implacable Resistance

"Very often when I do something which the state regards as illegal, I regard as legal. That is, I regard the state as criminal." - Noam Chomsky

So I’m off to the front line of the struggle, Triunfo de la Cruz, to meet the man who served 7 long years of illegal imprisonment. Alfredo Lopez currently plays a central role with the OFRANEH organization, and refusing to be silenced, has emerged as an eloquent and veracious voice denouncing injustice on his campaigning radio shows on the local Garifuna Radio Faluma Bimetu, (the Sweet Coco) and the regional-wide Radio Progreso. Implacable, he seems a living example of the dictum that what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

Never trust a cell phone. Sure enough the day we are meant to meet in the nearby town of Tela I can’t get through to his cell. Frustrated, I decide to board the chicken bus to Triunfo, on a blind attempt to locate him.

The bus is full of Garifuna speaking away in their own distinct Igñeri tongue, then suddenly changing to Spanish, and then, most strangely, occasionally speaking in English - and a very accented Bronx, New York English at that. I notice that the bus is full of kids and middle aged people: there is almost a complete lack of people in the 18-35 range. Then I remember that the Garifuna are a migrant community and almost half the population, predominantly young adults, live in the US.

We trundle into Triunfo de la Cruz and it’s a hot, sleepy Caribbean village with the 500 or so family houses spread out far and wide amongst the lush tropical trees. Because the town is not designed to the Spanish colonial pattern like the rest of Honduras, the imagined central plaza for me to debark at never materializes. I am already lost. So when most people have exited the bus that seems to be just riding around the labyrinthine roads somewhat randomly, I turn and ask the lady behind me where I can find Alfredo. As luck would have it, the lady tells me she is his sister.

"He’s very hard to find, you are lucky you met me," she tells me, as she takes me to her house. There she dispatches a child to alert her brother, and eventually, after getting clearance, we set off down back lanes and across yards and finally come to a little house under a bunch of big old trees. Kids are everywhere and Alfredo is busy finishing up installing a new water pump for his well as the community water system is not working.

"I’m hard to find, he says , "you were lucky." I am.

The recent spate of repression against OFRENEH members explains Alfredo’s allusive behavior. We sit under a tree and he holds a bundle of papers. He looks weary, it’s a difficult moment; OFRANEH is under a lot of pressure, people are being bought off, one by one. Other activists are migrating, Alfredo explains, and others still are simply tired of the struggle, resistance fatigue setting in. "We are really at a crucial moment in the struggle and it could go either way..."

Alfredo is an athletic 50-something year old (I used to play soccer professionally, he says), with a well lived in face and a mouth full of sparkling metal when he smiles, which he does as he tells his stories.

His is a world of total defiance. His foe – the government, the foreign investors, the compliant NGO’s and most of all, the local authorities in the town of Tela, those who framed him and killed his comrades – he refers to either as the all-encompassing "el turismo" or else simply, el enemigo – the enemy.

As in "the enemy is dividing the communities. They are setting up small meetings with certain individuals and creating divisions, so our unity is affected. They are systematically, house by house, removing us. Their tactics are complex, but familiar from other campaigns. El turismo is using local people, setting up NGOs as fronts, paying them well, buying some, pressurizing others. Our community assemblies are infiltrated by individuals working for el turismo, they try to ferment division..."

"Look what has happened in Miami" he says, referring to the only community so far to sell out to el turismo. "The community hardly exists now. It’s a tragedy, they tricked the people into signing over their deeds, and now the community is destroyed. It serves as a warning for what will happen to the rest. People look at Miami and see the future. That’s why the struggle here in Triunfo is so important. We are at the top of the list for el turismo, they want this land. If we hold out, so will the other communities."

His teenage daughter arrives out with a couple of plates of food. Delicious chicken, I’m thinking, savouring the home cooking.

"You like it?" asks the daughter.

"Fantastic."

"It's shark," she says with a laugh.

Fuck me! I’m eating a shark for the first time in my life and it’s great!

The conservation NGO's are pressuring the fishermen, explains Alfredo. Garifuna have always eaten shark and sea turtle and other now endangered ocean species.

"It's not us who emptied the ocean, we have always fished just for subsistence. Industrial fishing depletes the stocks." he says.

People constantly come and go, having a quick word with Alfredo, or looking for information. A big tall dreadlocked fisherman with hands the size of oars and an impressive laugh greets me like a brother, warm and friendly. He lingers long enough to assure me, as if there was any doubt at all in my mind – which I can assure you there was not – that he's totally down with the struggle. "To the very end," he says, with a great booming laugh.

Another man, clad in city attire, hands Alfredo an envelope, and leaves quickly, glancing about him. Cloak and dagger stuff. "We have our sources in the municipality," says Alfredo, his gold teeth flashing. "I broadcast all the inside information we receive on my radio show." Alfredo has a program on the community Radio Faluma Bimetu and uses it to inform the community of the case and the campaign. "The enemy are my best listeners because they know I’ve got the inside information!" He chuckles.

Alfredo loves to tell stories. Like when one of the OFRANEH members was arrested while blockading some construction equipment coming in. The cops brought him to the police station in nearby Tela. Within an hour a large group of Garifuna assembled, making a serious raucous with drums, music and dance, demanding his release. So he walked, the police not up to dealing with all these obstreperous Garifuna. Alfredo chuckles away while relating the story, his teeth sparkling, and it’s like every little victory for the community against the enemy fills his heart with joy.

Seven years in jail. I say. That’s tough.

"They’ll never stop me. This is a struggle to the end," he says. "We will do whatever it takes to win. We have the moral authority."

But he doesn’t want to dwell on the miscarriage of justice he has suffered, he is keen to talk about the work the campaign is doing now, or the community spirit, or the context of it all.

"Garifuna were never enslaved," he emphasis, proudly. "And our dignity keeps us resisting. The slaves’ families were broken up, but not the Garifuna and that is why they have been able to retain such a strong family bond, generations living in each others shadow. We have a real strength of community here. The spiritual element is important - our ancestors walk with us."

I can’t do justice here to his words, or how he expresses them. He speaks with utter conviction and carries himself like a proud chieftain of old, eloquent, and steadfast .

It’s one thing to read all the articles and reports about the epic Garifuna struggle but it’s another to sit here under the great old tree listening to this lion-hearted man talk, with all the children playing in the background, the sun setting over Tela Bay, a Caribbean sunset, the most majestic of them all.

What Is To Be Done?

The United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization declared Garifuna culture as one of the Heritages of Humanity, due to their "outstanding value, roots in cultural tradition, affirmation of cultural identity, source of inspiration and intercultural exchange, contemporary cultural and social role, excellence in the application of skills, unique testimony of living cultural tradition, and risk of disappearing."

A risk of disappearing because the Garifuna are up against murderous local authorities, the avarice of the central government, the neo-liberal plans of the foreign investors and a bunch of dodgy local and international NGOs. Now they are even pitted against members of their own community who have turned. In a word, the Garifuna are at a risk of disappearing because of capitalism. Savage, unremitting pursuit of profit.

"It’s all part of the broader Plan Puebla Panama and Cafta (Central America Free Trade Area)," says Alfredo, referring to the macro-economic plan for the region pushed by neo-liberal governments and institutions. But unity is strength and that is why they have strong ties with the indigenous network COPINH, and organizations further afield, like the Mexico-based COMPPA organization or US-based Rights Action. "We are in this together," says Alfredo, " same struggle, same enemies."

What can we do to help the Garifuna struggle? For a start we can help them develop their own local tourism by visiting them and make common cause with their plight. We can boycott the tourist industry and speak out about the inherent injustice of the mega-tourist development in the region. Italian solidarity groups have campaigned against the Italian consortium backing the project, and other groups are putting pressure on the Honduran government of Manuel Zelaya. The reputable Geneva based Human Rights group COHRE (Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions) found in July 2007 after a lengthy investigation, that "The government of Honduras is responsible for the violations of property rights, living conditions, development and life of the Garifuna communities of Triunfo de la Cruz and San Juan. Consequently it has the obligation to put integral reparation into effect, including just and adequate compensation."

That is not going to happen unless the corrupt, mercenary and criminal government at state and regional level are forced to do it.

"With such odds stacked against you," I ask Alfredo Lopez, "what are the hopes?"

"We have a string of petitions before the Inter-American Human Rights Court and we have high hopes that we can win there. The state has never won a case in that court."

"That's the hope?"

"We are in a struggle to save our people. We will do what we have to do here in Triunfo. We are the strongest community, so the struggle will be won or lost here. And we think we will win our demands! That is our hope."

***

Contact the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras at -ORGANIZACIÓN FRATERNAL NEGRA HONDUREÑA, OFRANEH Barrió El Centro, Avenida La República, 2ª Planta de Librería El Trébol, Contiguo a CELTEL, La Ceiba, Atlántida, Honduras, C. A. Apartado Postal 341.
Telefax: 00(504) 443-24-92,
e-mail: ofraneh@ofraneh.org.hn

COPINH (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras.)Barrio Lempira, La Esperanza, Intibucá, Honduras. copinhonduras@yahoo.es

COMPPA ( Coalition of Popular Communicators for Autonomy) http://www.comppa.org/

Note – Background information for this article is taken from Jose Idiaquez' The Walagallo: Heart of the Garifuna World, Envio magazine, and Rights Action Report - The Tourist Industry and Repression in Honduras (8.31.05).

Waiting For Hector

2008-03-11T13:44:00.001-07:00

An Implacable Fight for Justice in Nueva Linda, Guatemala
By Ramor Ryan, March 2008
Upside Down World >

Why would anybody camp by the side of a busy road? Why would anybody camp by the side of a busy road sheltered only by rough structures made from palm tree fronds in the punishing tropical heat and torrential downpours? And why would anyone do it for four long years?

Bety Reyes, an indigenous campesina, has been camping outside the Nueva Linda Finca on the road to Retalhuleu, Guatemala, and she remains there today. True enough, she isn't alone - she has her husband and children with her, as well as some of her extended family, and is accompanied by 173 other campesina families. And if you were to ask her why she has been camping at the side of the busy roadside for over 4 years in horrendous conditions, she will tell you, simply, that she is waiting for justice. Her father Hector Reyes was disappeared here on the Nueva Linda Finca on the 5th of September 2003; Hector’s family and their supporters are staying put until the authors of the crime are brought to trial. "A rich landlord disappeared a poor peasant," says Bety, "we know who did it, and now we want to bring them to justice."

One More Disappeared

The story of the Nueva Linda resistance encampment is one of unrelenting sorrow and unrepentant resilience. Hector Reyes worked as an administrator on the Nueva Linda Finca, one of the many huge plantation farms on the southern coast of Guatemala owned by a handful of wealthy landowners - this particular one owned by a Spaniard by the name of Carlos Vidal. Typically the conditions of work were semi-feudal, and farm hands received maybe $5 a day, working under harsh conditions in the scorching tropical heat. As soon as Hector Reyes stood up to defend the rights of his fellow workers, he was a marked man. They came for him in the dead of night, bundled him away and he was never seen again.

Disappearances are nothing uncommon in Guatemala. During the 36-year long Civil War, tens of thousands of labor and campesino organizers were disappeared without a trace, their corpses buried, tossed into the ocean, or sometimes dropped into volcanos from military helicopters.

Everybody on the Nueva Finca farm knew that the owner Carlos Vidal sent one of his henchmen, Víctor de Jesús Chinchilla, to get rid of Hector. Disappearing campesinos is of little more import for the land-owners of the fincas of southern Guatemala than culling pestilent beasts. What Senor Carlos Vidal had not accounted for was the determination of Hector’s family and his campesino organization - Maya Sin Tierra - to pursue the cause of justice.

In a brazen act of rebellion, 1200 campesinos occupied the Nueva Linda Finca on December 13 2003, surrounding Vidal's mansion and demanding the "re-appearance" of Hector Reyes, or his remains. Senor Vidal's favored means of transport in and out of his property was by helicopter, and landing became somewhat hazardous amongst a vast tent city of indigenous peasants squatting the entire area. That non-violent occupation demanding justice came to a dreadful and abrupt end ten months later on August 31, 2004 - Bloody Tuesday.

Death in Nueva Linda

It was a massacre foretold. Then President Oscar Berger predictably rolled over to pressure from the Farm Owners Association. "The state must protect private property," he announced ominously. "The state police must be sent in to evict the squatters in Nueva Linda."

So, one sunny morning armored vehicles accompanied by 1200 army, police and hired guns came up the road, spread out across the lush, verdant fields and opened fire on the squatters’ encampment. 9 campesinos were killed - five executed at point blank range, and 45 were injured. The unarmed protesters resisted - against the odds but fighting for their lives - and in the ensuing melee, 3 police were killed. Thirty-odd campesinos were brutally arrested and the camp lay vanquished, burnt to the ground. President Berger praised the security forces and blamed the indigenous for the massacre.

Massacres are nothing uncommon in Guatemala. Of the 200,000 deaths during the interminably long civil war, over 90% of the killing has been attributed to the Armed Forces, principally by means of massacre. Perhaps the most infamous of them all was the assault on the Spanish Embassy on Jan 31, 1980 - which had been occupied by protesters - in which over 40 people were murdered by the army. Since the signing of the Peace Accords in 1996, the unrelenting violence has persisted in the form of social war. As street gangs battle it out with each other and the security forces, social movements continue to be the target of human rights abuses. The Mirna Mack Foundation puts the death toll in the country at 25,700 - from just the last 5 years of generalized violence.

So the Nueva Linda massacre was soon forgotten in the media and the public consciousness as Guatemalans got on with living their lives in the shadow of huge daily insecurity, economic precariousness and the mass exodus of its youth to the arduous road toward the United States. What are 13 deaths in a remote field on the coast compared to the daily slaughter on the city streets? On the same day I visited the Nueva Linda Encampment, February 27 2008, I counted 13 reported violent street deaths in the daily newspaper.

But the campesinos of Nueva Linda continued their campaign of resistance. Soon after the massacre, Hector Reyes family fearlessly took up residence on the side of the road outside the Nueva Linda Finca. This few yards of land - a no-mans’ land between the landowner’s finca and the federal highway, could be squatted because it wasn't private property. There they boldly set up camp and were joined by survivors of the massacre and others from the national indigenous farmers coordination (CONIC) - eventually numbering 173 families. Conditions were appalling, but they pitched their makeshift tents of plastic sheets and palm tree fronds, dug a well for water, and like a little roadside refugee camp, they managed. The shameless finca owner set up an armed security post across the road to intimidate the encampment, but Hector Reyes' family and their supporters were immovable. "Not one step backwards" they said, "until justice is done,” now demanding justice for the victims of the massacre as well as the disappeared.

Government and Lies

Faced with such unrelenting determination, the state turned to more conniving and Machiavellian tactics to get rid of the problem.

"Hector Reyes migrated to the USA," stated the State Governor of Retalhuleu. Not only was he alive and well, the governor claimed, but they knew exactly where he was and were willing to pay the airfare for Hector’s wife, Floridema, to fly up there to find him! Floridema had been a persistent and troubling presence on the protest for the state and landowners. So, remarkably, off went Floridema on a desperate and futile goose chase across the state of Florida in search of a man who the people who sent her knew was buried not a mile from where she had been camping by the side of the road. Floridema remains in the US still, cleaning a hotel in Florida and sending back money to her family so that they can continue their roadside struggle.

The state hadn't counted on the resilience of Floridema's daughter, Bety, who continued to hold the family flag of resistance and leading the road-side vigil with new vehemence. She gave birth to a child during the long protest, naming him Hector in honor of her missing father.

Some two years passed by the side of the road, and the authorities steadfastly ignored the protest. So the protesters decided to relocate to the central plaza of Guatemala City, right in front of the palace of justice, putting the case back on the national agenda. But in a country where the left has been decimated, what hope is there for the social movement like the Nueva Linda protesters? The government continued to ignore their encampment in the central plaza and the mass media paid them scant attention. As they packed up their paltry possessions to return to the roadside at Nueva Linda after the month-long stint in the Capital, it might have seemed like they had touched rock bottom - a time of despair and hopelessness. But no, the protesters could still count on their resources and their own agency to carry them through. "If we don't struggle," a campesina told the cameras in a rain-swept central plaza, "what is left for us?"

Among the Implacable

There are those who struggle for a day and they are good.

There are those who struggle for a year and they are better.

There are those who struggle many years, and they are better still.

But there are those who struggle all their lives:

These are the implacable ones.
- Bertolt Brecht

The chicken bus speeds at top speed past kilometer 207 on the Retalhuleu-Champerico road, its tail-wind flapping the plastic sheet coverings of the roadside encampment in its wake. "We’re getting out!" I shout at the driver, and the old bus skids to a dramatic halt. All the passengers look curiously at the two gringos descending the bus in the middle of nowhere.

We jump onto the dusty roadside and clamber along the uneven ditch. An elderly man with but a couple of teeth is raking the dirt in front of a makeshift plastic bag hut - the first in a long line - and he smiles broadly.

"You have arrived," he says.

"Yes," we say, "we have arrived."

He points us up further along the track, towards camp central.

As we make our way along the ditch, I take in the surroundings. The Nueva Linda farm is a rich, fertile plain, flat and green as far as the eye can see. The aroma of the tropical vegetation is overpowering to the senses, but here by the side of the road, only the gaseous fumes of the constant traffic trundling by overwhelms us.

Welcome!" shouts Bety Reyes as we approach the heart of the encampment. She cradles an 18-month old child in her lap - young Hector, I presume - and she smiles effusively. We are quickly introduced to about a half dozen people and the mood is startlingly delightful. What’s up with these people? Shouldn't they be miserable, stuck forlornly on the road side for years, like some unremitting purgatory? But no, there is something else going on here.

The tractor trailers, buses and trucks and cars whiz by an arm’s length away. We, the visitors, are almost shaken to the core by their passing, but the occupants of the camp seem oblivious. Their mirth is contagious and even the kids seem enthused to meet us. Among the dust and debris of the ditch, their joy amazes us, as if the protest camp were a party, or perhaps some deeply intoxicating rebel elixir. It’s all good karma though, and, I surmise, it feels right to be humbled before others' high spirits. Mahatma Ghandi would have loved this place.

We are debriefed by the group’s human rights representative, Mariano Lellel of the Civil Association Pro-Justice Nueva Linda Group. As one of the most articulate and outspoken advocates for the protest, Mariano - a cheerful indigenous activist in his late 40's - is clearly a marked man. Death treats forced him to go underground recently, and he hid out in indigenous villages for 2 months. "I am like a hunted animal," he says, smiling wryly. But now he walks freely.

"What protection do you have?"

"National and international solidarity," he says.

Scant protection, I'm thinking. But Mariano is confident that the authorities and powers that be don't want to further tarnish their image in this sensitive case with another disappeared.

He is, however, far more eager to talk about the protest in general than his own personal safety. After four years, they are still confident of the future. While they are not expecting much from the new (slightly) left/leaning president, Álvaro Colom, it is a positive sign that he has accepted an invitation to meet them in person in Guatemala City. "[Former president] Berger tricked and mocked us," says Mariano, "let the new President prove himself by his actions."

“What gives the group hope?” I ask.

"We have brought a petition to the Inter-American Human Rights Commission", he says, "and that body has ruled favorably in the past with social movements."

“And what are your hopes beyond the immediate political goals?”

Mariano looks away ponderously, and for a moment he is actually thinking beyond strategy and tactics - into the realm of dreaming. "We wish that we can get a little piece of land so that we can stay together. Maybe we can get a loan from a national or international institution to help us achieve this. In this very area, where we are from..."

So at least one product of this epic struggle has been a group of people who want to live, work, and struggle, side-by-side, sharing the same space and land for the rest of their lives - together.

I find this thought quite satisfying. Having traveled a long way to know their struggle, I am very happy to have met these people.

For Justice's Sake

It is time for us to leave the encampment. In yet another stroke of bad fortune, an accidental fire a few weeks previous burnt most of the camp to the ground. Characteristically, residents bounced back undaunted and have rebuilt everything with gusto. A young girl comes forward to exhibit the pretty horrific 2nd degree burns on her arm and back, but even she is smiling and upbeat. How this struggle leaves its mark.

"For us, the poor, there is no justice," says Bety, as we bid farewell.

“What plans for the future?” I ask.

"I'm not moving anywhere soon," she says smiling and then gets back on her cellphone to discuss the case with some human rights lawyers in the city.

But finally, one last somewhat philosophical quandary that had been troubling my mind: “Why? Why sit on a roadside for 4 years? Why give your life to a cause? Is it to win, or is it because it is the right thing to do?”

Mariano, the hunted man, the marked man, replies with a characteristic wide smile - "It’s for both of these," he says, "and it’s for justice."

For more information, visit the Pro-Justice Nueva Linda Group,

or contact them here: info@justicianuevalinda.org

German Edition of Clandestines Published by Unrast

2007-10-06T13:29:00.000-07:00

Clandestinos
Unterwegs im Widerstand (Adventures in Resistance)
Unrast 2007

New Introduction to German Edition

On a warm summers night in 1989 I stood outside the infoladen on Mainzerstrasse as Clash's Spanish Civil War played over the speakers. The decrepit old tenement street was bedecked with bounteous flags and banners hanging from the colorful balconies of the numerous squatted buildings. As a young man exposed to this kind of autonomous squatting community for the first time, it was as if being dropped into some kind of delirious pirate wonderland, and I was enchanted.

Piles of cobblestones adorned the roadside, ready to resist attack, and sure enough, at this moment a bunch of football hooligans from the local east Berlin football club made a drunken foray up the dark, mostly deserted street. Fuck, I thought, the last thing I want to have to do is throw this lovely and full bottle of Berliner Pils in my hand at the thugs. What a terrible waste. The hooligans advanced noisily and slowly, waving sticks and chanting Nazi slogans. Somebody ran out of the infoladen, revved up their motorbike and went off to alert the other houses on other nearby streets.

The Berlin wall had only just come down, and the presence of cops in the old East was desultory. They had, anyhow, no idea how to deal with the sudden influx of a couple of thousand anarchist squatters. We were happy to have no cops around, and so it was up to us to defend the streets from marauding Nazis and football hooligans - of which there were plenty. They had already killed Silvio around the corner at Samariterstraße U-bahn, and firebombed several Mainzer houses.

A young woman emerged from the infoladen. It wasn't so much that she was six foot tall, dressed like a seventeenth century pirate queen, or that she sported lurid purple hair to shock and heavy black boots to kick; no, the most impressive feature was the large heavy wooden cane she carried, like an ancient ornate staff. She wielded the heavy old stick like a lethal nunchuck. "Fucking nazis!" she shouted and stormed off down the street towards the hooligans, facing them alone, one black woman armed with a big stick against twelve white blond- haired boys armed with drunken bravado.

They stopped, starred at her with surprise and horror, then turned on their heels and ran. She pursued them, swinging her big old club, while the rest of us laughed with jubilation at her audacious and bold endeavor. Mainz bleibt meins!

Such was my experience of the Berlin squatting scene. A place that was larger than life and overflowing with extraordinary people and times. Plots were hatched, connections made. Stories wrote themselves. And in that sense, Berlin was the cradle for these stories, Clandestinos : Unterwegs im Widerstand. (Adventures in Resistance).

Berlin formed me, and I carry it with me still. From those days I want to thank my comrades Robert and Oisin, not only for minding my boots that night I left Niederbarnim at dawn and walked to SEK in my bare feet (there was sekt involved), but for years of watching my back and unfettered bacchanalia. Later in NY both friends helped edit this text, and offered welcome criticism and ideas. Thanks to Day, my Mayday and partner in crime; to Paul Hirst, who taught me the nebulous ways of Friedrichsein ; to Simon who walked me through a mountain of bureaucracy to get a pot of gold ; and indeed to the larger Irish crew there involved in the scene who made me feel at home, ha-ha.

Berlin is a place of memories. Running across Alexanderplatz – fleeing the bullen – I met my homey Jorge, with whom I now live, One bloodied dawn, Ike missed the BMW and instead hit my head with a flying bottle, thanks mate. Katja Kunkel picked me off a sofa before the sun rose. Gabriel from Chile painted swirling figures as Brazilian music accompanied his marvelous strokes. Prince Sjorre walked me through a magical labyrinth of garbage, and Lisa Daub opened her door, offering a warm cup of Zapatista coffee.

Thanks to Matze, Stephanie and Lucy, Hubert and Andrea, Boris, Dario, Desi, Albatross, Barbara, Kevin - good German comrades who I admire and cherish.

And thanks to the other companeros who at one stage or another shared the Berlin times – Damian, Jim, Mick Mohawk, Stephen, Theresa, Jean, Tauno, Erik Petersen. To Siabhra Durcan, on the midnight train to Strahov. And to bolt of lightning Blanca GG, who amongst a thousand other things, kicked the early manuscript in to shape.

Cheers to my sisters Linda and Lauren, and my brother Bobby - generous and patient people who may not agree with all of this but have given me so much support, and everything.

Special thanks go to Katja Rameil who translated this difficult book written in Irish vernacular - while pregnant to boot! Katja has been there all along, from the Garden of Delight to Diez de Abril to the birth of Ixim to a pirate boat in Leipzig. Long live Katja, Muz and new life!

And to Niels Barmeyer who understands the English language better than I and hence made a brilliant contribution in reading the early draft of the book. Long life to my compas Niels, Anja and gorgeous Jannes.

Berlin is full of stories of love and despair. Deirdre of the Sorrows broke my young heart in West Germany, and Ana Laura Hernandez set it aflame at the Autonomen Congress of ‘95. And from that tempestuous ten year engagement came our beautiful son Ixim. Everything for Ixim, nothing for ourselves. All of this book is for you Ixim.

*

Indigenous Resurgence in Abya Yala

2007-06-18T12:18:00.000-07:00

"The only good Indian is a bad one."
Continental Summit of Indigenous nations and pueblos, Iximché, Guatemala, March 2007
from TowardFreedom.com

by Ramor Ryan

As the historic march flooded into the old colonial central plaza, there was a moment of great jubilation. From the side streets flowed legions of people from the feeder marchers, swelling the ranks of the main body. As the rivers of indigenous marchers merged, a tremendous roar filled the air as hundreds of smiling faces greeted each other like long lost brothers and sisters re-uniting—which of course in many respects, they were.

Guatemala City had never seen anything like it: thousands of Indigenous people from almost every country of the Americas coming together, celebrating their culture, and organizing resistance. This is the grand finale march on Guatemala City to top off the successful weeklong summit at nearby Iximché. The grey, suffocating streets are filled for once not with smog and gridlock, but with a blaze of color from the forest of rainbow colored flags and banners, and the sound of drums and pipes and maracas and the multitude of voices each with their own distinct language uniting to chant and sing together. Like the march of an army of the dispossessed—the lowest of the low, the invisibles—reclaiming the city of fear where once, not so long ago, they were hunted down, disappeared, and murdered with impunity by the state security forces.
"After more than 500 years of oppression and domination," proclaimed the Bolivian speaker from the stage before the cheering crowd, "they have not been able to eliminate us. Here we are alive and united with nature. Today we recuperate together our sovereignty…Our task is to begin to govern ourselves."

The Intriguing Annals of Iximché

This Third Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Nationalities of Abya Yala (referring to the North and South American continents in the Kuna language) is being convened amidst the ebullient upsurge in the fortunes of indigenous peoples across the Americas. The flagship on the rising tide is Evo Morales presidential victory in Bolivia. He is not the first indigenous president elected in Latin America, but he is the first indigenous and staunchly left representative in office—as much part of the indigenous revival as the Latin American left turn captained by Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. And this is the starting point of this summit—indigenous, left, and premised on the theme "from resistance to power."
"The indigenous people have decided to recuperate our identity, citizenship, natural resources, and culture," explained one representative from Ecuador, "and now we are setting our sights on taking political power."

This latest indigenous’ summit (the first was held in Mexico 2000, followed by Ecuador, 2004) is being convened in a suitably prestigious location. The sacred Mayan site of Iximché, 60 miles outside of Guatemala City is a place with a both lauded and turbulent past. The great city was once the capital seat of the Kaqchikel people. Typical of the rambunctious nature of indigenous history in general, Iximché —founded in 1470—has a complicated past. The Kaqchikel first collaborated with the invading Spanish conquistadores led by Pedro De Alvarado in 1524, against their old rivals, the neighboring K’iche states. Such a duplicitous collaboration soon came undone as they learned the true nature of the avaricious Spaniards. The Kaqchikel rebelled, overrunning the Spanish garrison in 1527. The Spaniards in turn came back in greater numbers and with new local allies, eventually vanquishing the Kachikel.

This week Iximché is transformed from a museum of the past and a case study for academics to being a vibrant theater for political discourse and cultural dynamism. Foremost on the minds of the organizers is to cleanse the space of the bad vibes left by President Bush, who visited here two weeks earlier while on his monumentally doomed Latin American tour. In an elaborate cleansing ceremony—signifying ignominy for the US President—the Mayan priests purified the space to replace "the politics of war with a politics of life, dignity, equality, transparency, inclusive democracy, and indigenous people’s unity founded on a sustainable co-existence with Mother Nature."

In the shadow of the old ruins, huge tents have been set up and a flurry of activities is going on as workshops and plenums take place in multiple locations. It is an autonomous space, controlled for the duration of the summit by the people themselves, without the presence of cops or authorities from the state.

Among the hordes of colorfully dressed delegates, the most prominent are the enthusiastic 70-strong Bolivian delegation, wearing distinctively beautiful textiles and the women in their signature bowler hats. The press is all over them, snapping away photos, knowing that this exotic indigenous eye-candy sells.

But as Ecuadorian Blanca Chancosa points out in her opening address – "We are not just for folklore or adornment, we want to be authors and constructors (of our own destiny)."
So each day, after the pre-dawn spiritual ceremony, such cosmological immaterialism is overshadowed by hardcore anti-neoliberal political discourse. The themes highlighted by the summit and its numerous workshops and panels include: land and territory, the depletion of natural resources, the environment, climate change, autonomy, migration, and privatization. Concrete campaigns and struggle against neo-liberalism, militarization, the US war and the US border wall were consolidated, as well as specific campaigns such as promoting economic alternatives, legalization of coca leaves and opening up Bolivia’s access to the sea.
Bolivia’s foreign relations minister David Choquehuanca sets the tone of the discussions, quoting a Chotewanka by saying , "Our minds are colonized, but not our hearts. It is time to listen to our hearts, because this is what builds resistance." Indigenous people, he said, should look how to "live well," to seek a "culture of life" rather than the one-dimensional development.
"Our world is not for sale," continued Blanca Chancosa. "Bush is not welcome here. We want instead people who support life. Yes to life! Imperialism and capitalism has left us with a historical debt and they owe us for this debt."

Bush is not welcome, but the US contingents are warmly received. Making the link between struggles north and south—across the despised Rio Brava wall—a representative from the Western Shoshone people said, "The indigenous here are facing the same kind of issues we are facing in the North, and face the same threats by the multi-national corporations such as mining and environmental contamination. These affect the traditional foundation of our nations which is the land, the air, the water, and spirituality."

Linking the environmental and the political is a constant underlying theme here in this construction of a "culture of life." Capitalist neo-liberalism is fueling environmental destruction, as Miguel Palacin from Peruvian peasant organization CONACAMI emphasizes: "They are trying to create economic blocs to impose treaties based on the exploitation of nature. But now we are becoming visible, because they are messing with Mother Earth, and we are organizing in order to respond. "

From the panels discussing Territory, Natural Resources, and the Indigenous People, Magali Rey Rosa, of the Guatemalan Madre Tierra organization has the final word: "Mother Earth is not bearing up any more with the kind of use that the dominant civilization is imposing on its ecosystem. Development is smothering life. If we continue with this boss," she said wittily, "our Earth will not survive."

The Zapatista No-Show

The set up of the indigenous summit is modeled on the World Social Forum, both in method and style. There is the usual elaborate registration process, accompanied by the ubiquitous paraphernalia—t-shirts, shoulder bags, glossy brochures, and posters. Oxfam and other NGOs are footing the bill. Considering that the political formation of many groups and organizations is old-school Left, the methodology of the summit is centralized and hierarchical.

There is little of the new methodology of the more anti-authoritarian elements of the movement—no horizontalidad or Zapatista-style assemblies. Indeed the absence of a Zapatista delegation is telling, being so close to Chiapas. Chavez and Fidel are the non-indigenous inspirations here, not Marcos or Flores Magon. Said one Guatemalan delegate hailing from a group linked to the ex-guerrilla URNG, "We think the Zapatistas have ceased to have any significance."

So the dominant political overture is about constituting a new democratic Left. The new Continental-wide radical indigenous resurgence is marked by a division between the Zapatista model—anti-Capitalist, anti-electoral, and focused on building grassroots autonomy—and the Bolivian model—anti-neo-liberal, constitutional, and seeking power by uniting social movements in a common electoral platform. While many people in the attending the summit would probably position them in varying degrees between the two poles, the final documents and declarations clearly assume the latter line.

And going down the constitutional road in an effort to take political power necessitates a strong central leadership. As Bladimir Painecura, Mapuche, points out, "The maturity of the leaders participating today and the solidity they bring to the discussions [is the strong point of this movement]. As a result of this maturity, the movements have been consolidated and bring social transformation to the nation-state, as witnessed in Bolivia. Indigenous peoples have advanced and have continued resisting, so much so that they have arrived at power, and are administering well."

Tecpan: Building a Culture of Life from the Ruins of War

In a vast old rustic town hall, thousands of delegates join with the local townspeople to celebrate the finale. Although Tecpan is a racially evenly mixed town, it’s noticeable that very few of the Mestizo population have come out to celebrate with the indigenous. The wounds of Guatemala’s 30-year long brutal civil war linger in rural towns like these despite the peace accords signed over ten years ago. The rebels were supported predominantly by the indigenous poor and the state by the Mestizo middle class. Tecpan was witness to guerrilla combat, army massacres, disappearances, and all the horrors of counter-insurgency repression.

Like all encuentros of this kind, much of the important work is done beyond the official panels and workshops. At social events like this, personal and political networking takes precedent, and the unofficial stories emerge. For example, why did Nobel Peace Prize winner and prominent indigenous rights spokeswoman Rigoberta Menchu not appear at the summit? She is currently running as a presidential candidate in the upcoming Guatemalan election. Although she has little chance of winning, one would expect support from this very summit considering she is indigenous, of the Left, and running for political power.
"She is a thought to be a pawn of the Right Wing and the ruling class," a community leader from the Coban region tells me. "She doesn’t represent the indigenous; she is interested in power and has cut a deal with the Mestizos and the rich. They tolerate her so as to show the world that Guatemala has changed and has stopped oppressing the indigenous. But it’s a lie…"

The time for speeches and presentations has arrived. I discover to my horror that they are awarding all the different delegations with plaques to commemorate their participation in the event. When the moment arrives to call the Irish delegates to receive theirs, it seems I am the only Irish person present to accept the award. The other two Irish are nowhere to be seen. The truth is that I am here somewhat accidentally—a gatecrasher of sorts—and certainly don’t merit any sort of accolade. I had been traveling across Guatemala on my way to cover a story in Nicaragua when my Irish magazine, Island, sent an email to say they had folded, and there was no more Island to write for. Fortunately the photographer I was traveling with noticed in the morning newspaper that there was an indigenous summit taking place nearby. So we came here on a whim. Now I am approaching the organizing committee who are all smiling broadly to collect the plaque, and I’m wondering what I can possibly say. What have the Irish ever done to help the indigenous of the Americas throughout the ages? Should I quote the infamous US General of Irish descent, Philip Sheridan—the racist mass murderer who led the "Indian Wars" in the 1860s—accredited with the charming ditty "The only good Indian is a dead one"?

I am spared the ordeal as someone snatches away the microphone to make an important announcement. I scurry away with the impressive ornament feeling like a bit of a shyster. Later that night, over strong local hooch given out for free for those delegates still going strong by midnight, a garrulous Canadian delegate is telling me about the militant Six Nations struggle in Ontario where the indigenous resurgence is gaining ground, and he re-quotes Sheridan. "You see, buddy, the only good Indian is a bad Indian!" Yo, high five—slap!

The Declaration of Iximché: From Resistance to Power

Back on the central streets of Guatemala City, the thousands of marching delegates are joined by thousands of local indigenous peasant farmers from the CNOC, CUC, and CONIC organizations. These are groups formed by war victims, refugees and support base of the 80s resistance, and the remnants of the near genocidal state onslaught that claimed more than 100,000 lives, mostly rural indigenous. I remember being here in this same city in the early 90s staying at a human rights house, feeling petrified as police agents tailed us and death threats were left on the phone. To be a "bad Indian" in those days meant death. Now, here they are—the rebel indigenous, re-emerging from the shadows and re-claiming public space one more.
Amidst spiritual ceremony and music and dance spectaculars, the celebrated "Declaration of Iximché" is read out, to "announce the continental resurgence of the Pachacutic (the return) along with the closure of Oxlajuj Baq’tun (long count of 5,200 years), and as we approach the door of the new Baq’tun, we journey together to make Abya Yala a "land full of life." Then the declaration gets down to the hard political specifics: against the FTAA (Free Trade Agreement for the Americas), against transgenics, against multinational mining and resource extraction, against Bush’s war and the US border wall and condemning the practices of the Inter American Development Bank, the World Bank, and similar global institutions which manipulate the indigenous. The document stands firmly for indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, autonomy, and self-determination, ratifying historical rights to stolen territories, and consolidating unity between the different indigenous groups.

To the somewhat mysterious and haunting epitaph, We Have Dreamt Our Past and We Remember Our Future, the demonstration and the summit concludes, and the multitude disperses into the ominous dusk of the dangerous and insecure city. The departing mood is not triumphant but resilient and quietly optimistic. Despite everything—500 years of colonization, dispossession, poverty and migration—the resurgent indigenous of the continent have survived and are looking to the future.

Interview : On the road with an Irish Pirate / Feature in the Northern Express

2007-05-15T17:02:00.000-07:00

by Holly Wren Spaulding

In anticipation of his appearance in Traverse City next week, Irish author Ramor Ryan took time out to talk about his new book, Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile, life in a conflict zone, and his political coming of age during the embattled Ireland of the 1980s.

NE: I understand you’ve read in Ireland, England, Germany, Mexico, New York, San Francisco — we’re lucky to make it onto your tour.

Ramor Ryan: I have to say that I have wanted to visit Traverse City for many years, as I have very special connections with the community there!

NE: You’ve been living outside Ireland for much of your life—do you feel at home somewhere else, or are you essentially foreign wherever you find yourself?

RR: I’m never certain whether the journey is towards home, or the journey is home, but at this point, the notion of home is not represented by a physical space. The worrying precariousness of that is measured by the incandescent weightlessness of the transient, semi-nomadic life. Despite having lived the last few years predominantly in Chiapas (Mexico), the place itself feels no more home than a ship’s port. Where is home? I suppose my physical home is where my hat is. My heart’s home is where my beloved four-year-old boy is, but the guiding trajectory of the last 20 years is that home is amongst the radical community: home is amongst those who struggle.

NE: So there is a tension, right? Is that the condition of being an exile?

RR: Especially when one chooses conflict zones as I seem to have a propensity to do, yeah.

NE: Your book made me think I should catch a ride on the high seas. Do you find that your readers are especially responsive to certain stories or ideas?

RR: One reader wrote that she found throughout the book a re-surfacing of her own history, like a map of where she had been. I liked that because it fed into the initial impulse I had to write – to articulate collective experiences, and to communicate. Eduardo Galeano has written that “Our writing is informed by a desire to make contact, so that readers become involved with words that come to us from them, and return to them as hope and prophecy.” Mostly people write that the stories awaken the desire to go forth and engage life, to take a chance with things.

NE: What is your affinity with pirates?

RR: Well, it’s the sea, of course, roaming the great oceans populated by romantic and rakish raconteurs; outlaws, the seductive sense of wild, tumultuous freedom. One pirate described it as “Life on a pirate ship was mostly drunken idleness, with brief periods of violent action”, which always appealed more to me than say, working in insurance. The first pirate I learned of was the famous Irish pirate queen Granuaile, whose island refuge was visible off the coast from my mother’s home in County Mayo. Tales of Granuaile’s exploits filled my youthful fancies in the intimate sense that she was born amongst us, a local folk heroine. Now she’s on Broadway, of course, a big star like Peter Pan or someone. Our Granuaile was a rebel, a Robin Hood of sorts; she wasn’t an unsavory character at all – actually I’d say she was quite a role model!

NE: There has been a conflict between the Mexican government and the indigenous people of the region for the whole time you have lived in Chiapas. What is it like to be in the midst of that?

RR: Of course the point of the State’s “low intensity conflict” is that it keeps the population on edge and creates a climate of fear, like in New York City where everyone remains edgy with the constant terror alerts. Here in Chiapas, the impact is visible via the saturation of government troops throughout the conflict zone and the more insidious tactic of creating divisions amongst the indigenous communities and zones under rebel Zapatista control. So on top of the usual stress of trying to scrape a living, bring up families and dealing with the high level of insecurity and crime typical of any impoverished area, the people here have to deal with the counter-insurgency conditions too. It’s very tough, psychologically, and these repressive conditions have remained constant since 1994, the year of the initial Zapatista uprising, which is what interested me in the place to begin with.

NE: What is a rebel zone, practically speaking?

RR: These are the autonomous regions of Chiapas, covering an area about the size of the state of Connecticut—mainly rural backlands and jungle, encompassing several hundred thousand people. The population governs itself through a regional network of autonomous municipal councils, made up of a rotating assembly of community members. The council assemblies deal with all aspects of daily life in the communities - land issues, justice issues, education and health, as well as distribution of resources. There is no presence of the federal Mexican state, whom the people decided were not operating in their interests. “We don’t want the racist, repressive Mexican state here,” they said in the armed uprising of 1994. “We can govern ourselves better, according to our own traditions and customs.” And they have proved it with thriving autonomous municipalities 13 years later.

NE: Who are your literary influences?

RR: Despite 800 years of colonization—or perhaps because of it—there is one great privilege in being born Irish: the wealth of our literary heritage. I have grown up reading Joyce, Yeats, Brendan Behan, Oscar Wilde and the whole pantheon. Camus provided a continental perspective—existential and satisfyingly bleak. As I spread my wings, I found Latin American magical realism—the likes of Isabel Allende and Gioconda Belli. Eduardo Galeano and Arundhati Roy, both of them politically engaged writers, accompany my every written word, as well as the Zapatista Communiqués of Sub-Comandante Marcos, which take engaged literature to another level of praxis. Does Uncle Noam (Chomsky) count as literature?! I’m reading John Ross’s Murdered By Capitalism at the moment, and love it – Oh to be as erudite as that inspired man!

NE: Were there stories when you were growing up that especially shaped you?

RR: One of my earliest memories is of being brought to Dublin city centre for the day by my big sister. A huge car bomb set by pro-British terrorists went off, killing a dozen shoppers a couple of blocks from where we strolled. I remember dreaming of that explosion a lot afterwards and it haunted my boyhood imagination. Later, the great hunger strike of 1981– when 10 young republican political prisoners starved themselves to death to protest British criminalization of their struggle – loomed large on my horizon. As an adolescent this had a profound effect on me. Why were they doing this? Why were they political prisoners? What was the great narrative absorbing the nation and of which these 10 young men were central stage? Why was everyone out in the streets, marching and protesting and rioting? It was impossible not to get caught up in it all.

NE: The political landscape has shifted dramatically in the last few years, whereto with people’s struggles now?

RR: The political trajectory in Clandestines maps the shift of focus in the progressive movement during the ‘90s from anti-imperialism to anti-globalization, representing the change of focus from the state to transnational corporations. The Bush regime has of course reignited the state’s imperial drive with his military expeditions in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Anti-war struggle remains the most poignant space of contestation in the U.S.

NE: This book is a sort of odyssey, a record of a vibrant era, but it is also an invitation, no?

RR: An invitation, I think, using a popular phrase, to be a Zapatista wherever you are!

NE: There must be an extra incentive to live a vital, inquisitive life, thereby generating material for your writing.

RR: Well in that sense, I think my book Clandestines was a bit accidental and unconscious! Having finally ground to a halt after years on the road (nest building while awaiting the arrival of my son Ixim), I found I had some time and space to write. To reflect upon lived experience. “The overflow of powerful feelings from emotions recalled in tranquility,” as Wordsworth described his writing process. The Institute of Anarchist Studies kindly gave me a bit of money, and so the book tumbled out. I was hoping to share my experiences of various radical and revolutionary movements and moments with others. It’s not really meant to be about my life, but about the lives I’ve had the fortune of encountering.

Ramor Ryan reads at Horizon Books in Traverse City, Monday, May 21 at 7 p.m. He’ll appear at the Inside Out Gallery on May 26, 7 p.m.

Nowhere

2007-04-23T19:40:00.000-07:00

Reflections on a Zapatista Utopia (from Island Magazine)
by Ramor Ryan

Midnight Ignored
There are no fireworks, no bells, no dancing, no embracing, and certainly no booze. Midnight passes and the New Year is ushered in without even a word of acknowledgement from the stage. The 6000 people gathered in the great muddy open-aired amphitheatre of the Zapatista headquarters at Oventic, Chiapas shuffle about in the thick mountain fog, a few diehards shaking hands. The majority indigenous Zapatista’s, masked in ski masks or bandanas, barely move - as is their custom, their tradition. It is an unusually solemn and surreal way to herald in 2007 and mark the 13th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising on the 1st January 1994.

Wouldn’t any right-thinking Dubliner be stumbling around Christchurch Cathedral at this time, wasted amongst old friends, family and that particular species – the late-night garrulous Irish horde? Why spend it here in the eerie fog flanked by the craggy peaks and deep hollows of the towering mountains of south-east Mexico, literally off the map, the whereabouts of this rural hamlet only revealed by asking the right (generally masked, surreptitious) people along the mountain paths?

Because nowhere is always somewhere, whether it be the ragged edge of the universe, or this Zapatista nowhere, which despite the demure proceedings, the remoteness of the location and the absence of alcohol (prohibited under Zapatista Revolutionary Law) is host to an extraordinary celebration.

Not just because it’s the 13th anniversary of the armed uprising that resonated across the globe, re-igniting a dormant revolutionary current, and not because it’s the first ‘intergalactic’ gathering of the anti-capitalist movement in the 21st century. ‘A meeting of resistances and rebels against capitalism and global neo-liberalism,’ in the words of Comandante Moises from the stage, ‘and how to prepare ourselves and continue organizing resistance to combat the common enemy of all humanity.’

No, it’s something else: there is a touch of magic in the air. It is hinted at when a young indigenous Tseltal woman called Josefina from the Good Governance council speaks: ‘We the Zapatistas are free to organize ourselves, to govern ourselves, and to make our own decisions without being exploited by capitalist ideas. Because of that we had the idea to build a new society and a new struggle.’

So that’s what it is. This Zapatista nowhere -- where the inhabitants have rebelled and now govern in their own autonomous fashion -- carries within it the echoes of a beautiful old idea: utopia.

Autonomy as a Utopian Space
Sir Thomas More, a principled catholic executed by an unprincipled king and later beatified and canonized, coined the term Utopia (derived from the Greek words οὐ ou ("not") and τόπος tópos ("place").) in his seminal 1512 work. In the book, More portrays an imaginary perfect society, where private property does not exist, premised on radical democracy and religious tolerance. Thereafter, history resonated with notions of utopia. An early romantic manifestation came in the form of pirate utopias, autonomous enclaves - often fiercely democratic - existing in the shadows of 17th century capitalist expansionism. Karl Marx’ vision of an ideal communist state is informed by the idea, and thus gave rise, amongst other currents, to the utopian socialist movement

But let’s not get carried away. While the romantic element is potent in the Zapatista arsenal this new years eve – the full moon, the craggy peaks, the masked multitudes and the stirring revolutionary words – the gathering is concerned mostly with exigencies of the everyday struggle in the here and now.

This whole 4-day event – somewhat grandiosely called the First Encounter between the Zapatista’s and the People of the World - is not a political rally, radical academic conference or activist forum. It is ‘a space for a collective analysis and vision to emerge.’ The 2000 people from 47 countries (mostly Mexico) and the 4000 indigenous Zapatistas coming from all the regions of Chiapas are here to take stock of the situation after a particularly tumultuous year in Mexico and an eventful year globally. The large numbers present are a boost for a national anti-capitalist movement facing considerable challenges from a newly formed government of President Calderon – conservative and militaristic – which promises radical social movements the “iron fist”.

But mostly it’s a showcase of the Zapatista political culture, the nuts and bolts of constructing everyday participatory autonomy. Or how this little corner of the world - the Zapatista rebel zone, about the size of Munster - is governed in the absence of state authority. How they self-organize education, health, justice and land issues, through the 5 Good Government councils, across 29 regional autonomous municipalities, covering a reputed 1,110 rural villages.

The Zapatistas eschew party politics, instead focusing on organizing from below, amongst the grass roots. They are not interested in assuming state office. Everything for everyone, nothing for us, is a principle applied in their initiatives, including questions of power. ‘Autonomy,’ says radical academic and Zapatista theorist John Holloway, ‘is simply the other side of saying that we want to change the world without taking power.’

Zapatismo is not a cult, or a doomsday sect. It positions itself firmly within the national and global political discourse, albeit at the cutting edge. ‘Zapatismo is nowadays the most radical, and perhaps the most important, political initiative in the world’, says Mexican writer Gustavo Esteva. Yet it also embraces the utopian notions of a nowhere that is a refuge and a place of solace – both physical and metaphysical - for the world weary, the rebels, the excluded and the misfits.

Despite numerous attempts, I never really enjoyed ringing in the New Year at Dublin’s Christchurch cathedral. There was always something pathetic about the vacuous attempt to have a really marvelous time. Instead it invariably ended up in a Burdocks chipper fight or a vomit strewn pavement.

“Our territory is also your home’ says Comandante Moises, ‘You are welcome.’ Like a world turned upside down, here we have peasant farmers from a wretched corner of the global south offering solace to political ‘refugees’ from the urban metropolises and the rich north.

I am glad that the Zapatistas offer an alternative, allowing us to dream that another world is possible, and reminding us that at the ragged edge of the universe, a place called utopia can still exist.

Selling the Water Commons from Right Under Our Noses.

2007-03-12T09:06:00.000-07:00

From LASC magazine, March 2007.
by Ramor Ryan

10 years ago the barrio where I live was a swamp on the outskirts of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico, populated by a herd of scrawny cows. Migrants and refugees from the countryside arrived on mass – like any rapidly urbanizing centre in the 3rd World - and now it’s a teeming barrio of cement, home to thousands of mostly indigenous families. Prosperity has come to some: a few cars in the street, some fancy houses, and progress to all in the form of electricity, TV cable and internet. But nevertheless, despite this small prosperity there is one vital element consistently lacking in the peoples’ lives: water. Sometimes it comes for an hour a day; sometimes it doesn’t come all week.

Why is there no water? The tropical state of Chiapas is known as Mexico’s water bank, with the greatest mean average rain fall annually. Its huge dammed rivers exports hydroelectric power to other states.

“The water crisis is a result of the way it is consumed,” explains local water activist Cacho, part of the strong barrio anti-privatisation movement. “The problem is the excessive consumption of water and the unequal access among the different sectors of the population. There is no water rationing or shortage for the business and tourist centre of town.”

Currently, the local municipal government controls the water supply.

“And the local water authorities are running down the service in the barrios in order to open the way for privatisation,” explains Cacho. “Meanwhile they are selling off concessions to private interests to exploit the water”

In the ultimate irony, Coca Cola ‘won’ a concession to build a factory on top of San Cristobal’s aquifer. Exploiting the water resources at a monthly rate of 3.5 million litres, Coca Cola pays the municipality a measly $500 annually. (Incidentally, the director of the National Water Commission, Senor Jactes, was ex-director of Coca Cola.)

And its becomes clear from the abundant litter strewn around this poor barrio – predominantly plastic soda and water bottles – that the water is directly being taken from the aquifer, bottled, and sold to the people at a profit for Coca Cola.

At base, the struggle over the water is a clash of two visions: those who see it as an economic good to be sold on the market to the highest bidder, and those who view it as part of the common good, to be distributed equally amongst the people who use it.

The campaign against privatisation in Chiapas is gaining ground, led by the example of the Zapatista and other indigenous communities to hold the water resources as part of the community patrimony. “In the most democratic way the people have said the water is public property”, says writer Eduardo Galeano. “And this is a way of saying to the owners of the world, the gentlemen of the market- we are not for sale!”

Leaving this Stage of History

2007-02-14T17:24:00.000-08:00

For Island Journal
by Ramor Ryan
Nairobi, Kenya, November 2006.

1. The Quiet Apocalypse of Rising Tides

Climate change is everywhere.

A momentous report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) confirms that climate change is 'man-made and unstoppable'. The 21-page report, described as conservative by the IPCC itself, says human-made emissions of greenhouse gases are to blame for heat waves, floods and heavy rains, droughts and stronger storms, melting ice-caps and rising sea-levels.

The IPCC is comprised of over 2000 climate experts and scientists. It was set up in 1988 by the UN and the World Meteorological organisation to guide policy makers on the impact of climate change. Despite strenuous attempts by oil companies and big business to undermine the final report, it remains quietly apocalyptic in its assessment.

Its mind-boggling conclusion predicts serious water shortage for between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people, food shortages for 200 to 600 million people. Coastal flooding will hit seven million people within 70 years. The list of potential catastrophe goes on and on.

Yet critics say the report underplays the size of the calamity. James McCarthy, a climate expert at Harvard and former IPCC panel member says the report underestimated the true level of rising sea levels, possibly making the findings of the panel 'foolishly cautious and maybe even irrelevant' on the issue.

Climate change is everywhere, even penetrating the fears of the righteously paranoid psyche of the scientists and nuclear physicists of the pre-eminent Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Their 'Doomsday Clock' has been ticking away to midnight - the figurative end of civilisation - for 61 years of nuclear holocaust watching. In an unprecedented move they have moved the clock two minutes closer to midnight - now standing at a perilous five minutes to midnight - not only because of the increase in likelihood of nuclear war with the recent events around North Korea and Iran. They also cite 'the potential for catastrophic damage from human-made technologies'. In what represents a decisive paradigm shift for the Atomic Scientists, Kennette Benedict, director of the bulletin said, 'The dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons.'

Climate change was a top priority at the conference of world business leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, as well as the conference of NGO operatives at the World Social Forum in Nairobi. Meanwhile, the European Commission urged its members to adopt an unprecedented common energy policy, aimed at cutting greenhouse gases by 20% by 2020. It calls for a 'post-industrial revolution' based on a dramatic shift to an internally produced low-carbon energy economy.

Climate Change has finally arrived at the White House. President George W. Bush's State of the Union address, January 27, marked a milestone for his administration by actually recognising that we may indeed have a human-made problem after all. He acknowledged climate change as 'a serious challenge' and the need for reduction in fossil fuel consumption. Rather than announcing a mandatory cap on emissions along the lines of the globally accepted Kyoto Protocol, Bush instead meekly recommended an added emphasis on renewable or non-carbon energy sources - ethanol, wind, solar and nuclear power. As the world's leading producer of greenhouse gases, these are hardly the momentous steps needed by the USA to put a break on runaway global warming.

What is to be done in the face of the looming catastrophe? The predominant global platform to deal with fundamental issues that affect all of humanity is the United Nations. The new UN boss Ban Ki-moon has been asked to convene an emergency international summit. 'Climate change,' responded Ban, 'is one of the most important and urgent agendas that the international community has to address before 2012.' An emergency global conference organised by the UN seems imminently urgent and Nairobi has been suggested as a host.

But wasn't there an emergency climate change in Nairobi just last year? Wasn't the much heralded 12th UN Conference on Climate Change and 2nd Meeting of the Parties of the Kyoto Protocol held there November 6-17, 2006? Of course it was, and its abysmal failure to produce agreements between nations and to begin to build capacity for dealing with climate-induced problems has been brushed under the carpet.

To understand how limited the UN structure is in dealing with the urgency of the matter and how these grand global meetings are manipulated and side-tracked by powerful business and economic interests, it's worth returning to Nairobi in November to have a closer look at the workings of the UN.

2. Journey into the Heart of UN Darkness

Nairobi, Kenya, November 2006.

Climate Change is everywhere.

Especially in Third World metropolises like Nairobi. Stuck in a massive traffic jam from the airport to the city centre, I ask the taxi driver if people here know much about climate change and global warming. He nearly ploughs into a passing family of four on a bicycle he was laughing so mirthfully.

'Droughts, floods, famines, the rains comes heavy or don't come at all,' he says. 'Yes, of course we know all about global warning!'

He goes on to explain how the British colonisers had chosen the site of Nairobi as the Capital because it was cool and mosquito free.

'This is no longer the fact,' explains the taxi man. 'Now Nairobi is warm and we are plagued by mosquitoes.'

This bustling city is like a blueprint for all major population centres in the not too distant future - a place overburdened by massive migration from the countryside, chronic insecurity and an infrastructure woefully inadequate to deal with basic matters of water, drainage, transport, and communication. Nairobi hosts one of the worlds largest slums - Kuresoi; population over one million living in dire poverty. This very week in the nearby Mathare slum rival gangs battled each other, causing ten deaths, dozens of burnt shacks and thousands of slum-dwellers fleeing the violence. The near post apocalyptic landscape of the enormous Mathare slum and its almost unbearable living conditions contrasts obscenely with the lush, enclosed UN enclosure occupying most of the posh district of Gigiri. The wealthy enclave host numerous embassies, government minister residencies, NGO headquarters and a massive shopping mall, all heavily patrolled by armed guards and state of the art security features. The walled oasis of the privileged elites exists uneasily amidst a desert of the multitudes depravity, like a global Baghdad Green zone.

It's here at the extensive UN compound that over 70 ministers of state, and 6000 of their bureaucratic UN and NGO lackeys gather under the auspices of the UN's Climate Change Conference to hammer out a strategy to tackle the calamitous situation.

'The world is keenly awaiting the outcome of the deliberations going on there,' says Mr. Gilbert M. Kari somewhat anxiously, a local pest controller who has witnessed first hand the chaos climate change is wreaking on national coffee production. His is an almost universally heard concern. He and the rest of the world are in for a big disappointment.

This 12th session of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) conference of parties also serves as the second meeting of the parties to the Kyoto Protocol. The 1997 Protocol is a legally binding set of targets for cutting carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for developed nations to an average of 95% of individual countries' 1990 levels. Baby steps perhaps, but still too great a leap for the USA. 186 countries have signed the Kyoto Protocol but still the US balks. The US produces a quarter of global greenhouse gases but has only 4% of the world's population. The whole of Africa, in contrast, emits just 3.5%.

The keystone document for this particular Conference is the Stern Report. Where once global warming was seen as an ecological and environmental issue, the report focuses on the economics of climate change. The study led by World Bank Economist Sir Nicholas Stern, with its dizzying array of figures and calculations, leads inexorably to the conclusion that the battle against climate change makes good economic sense. The financial cost of action, it warns sternly, will be much less than the cost of inaction.

Mingling somewhat uncomfortably amongst the throng of expensively coiffured UN delegates sporting the ubiquitous top range lap-tops and talking incessantly on cell-phones, I stumble down corridors flanked by a trade-fair collection of stands hawking a variety of alternative energy plans or carbon-free initiatives. Technical companies advertising their genetically modified bio-fuel producing crops compete for the carbon free market alongside representatives of the nuclear industry: climate change for some is becoming big business.

With all the verve of Michael Moore, I door-step one of the official US delegates rushing along the corridor. He is an immaculately presented young man with the appearance of a Navy Seal and the arrogant attitude of a cantankerous frat boy.

As the largest single contributor to the greenhouse effect and global warming, I ask him, is there any sign of change in the US position on restricting carbon emissions or signing up to the Kyoto Protocol, with the other 186 nations?

'There are no signs of change in that policy soon,' the delegate answers somewhat mechanically; definitely disinterested. 'The US won't sign the Kyoto Protocol.'

'Even in light of the Stern Report, which suggests the world economy will shrink by 20%, isn't there a clear economic imperative to tackle the problem,' I insist somewhat earnestly, 'and ...'

He stops me in my tracks, looking me up and down for my credentials to ascertain who I was or what organisation I belonged. Unaccredited, a gatecrasher of sorts, I lack my badge.

'Who the heck are you?' he quips somewhat amusingly, 'some kind of Irish Borat?'

Over at Plenary Room 2, the conference is in full swing before a great assembly of dignitaries and functionaries fanned out in a great swathe of seated rows. The speaker's voice booms over the PA and their image is projected on two huge video screens on the flanking walls like a U2 concert. The delegates glance at their lap-tops, whisper on their cell-phones, sip bottled water and occasionally listen in on the simultaneous translation earphones. Sure enough, the gripping words of His Eminence Nurlan A. Iskakov, Minister of Environment Protection of Kazakhstan go unappreciated. When the senior US representative, Paula Dobriansky, Under-secretary of Democracy and Global Affairs takes the stage, a hush finally descends, cell-phones are downed and the whole auditorium pays rapt attention.

'The most effective strategies on climate change,' says Under-secretary Dobriansky, a hard-core Bush-ite and neo-con, 'are those that are integrated with economic growth, with energy security, and reducing air pollution.' In her oblique obfuscation, she is spelling out US refusal to agree on mandatory emissions limits, thereby wrecking any concerted global attempt to move forward at this conference. Dubriansky's supercilious presentation talks up US Aid to Africa and, by omission, reiterates the Bush administration's mantra that unfettered US-led capitalist globalization hand-in-hand with war in the Middle East to secure oil supplies are the priorities. Global warming, or 'air pollution' as the unctuous Under-secretary refers to it, is a side-show to the main event - capitalist expansion. Business as usual then on the United Nations world stage: US economic interests come first and the UN is held hostage to the world's sole superpower.

Taking lead from US intransigence, other heavyweight capitalist globalizers (and emerging major contributors to the greenhouse effect) China and India steadfastly refuse to cap their emissions citing their own economic interests. Joining the refusnik fest, Russia also begins to drag its feet.

'There is a scandalous lack of urgency!' says Mr. Tearfund Andy Atkins, summing up the conference mood and, it could be said, the NGO position in general.

The rest of the conference seemed to fade after the US Under-secretary's pronouncements, as if the participants knew little could be achieved without the nod or blessing from the US. The much lauded UN conference retreats into incoherent and incessantly procedural issues that revolve mostly about recording itself, and its own bureaucratic inanity. I attend one torturous two-hour meeting, seating myself in the vacant Irish delegate's place and availing of their bottled water and ear-phones. Casting a glance around at the disinterested attendees who seemed as bored as I, it is clear that they are more preoccupied with their personal email than the plodding, inchoate official proceedings. The minutes released the following day are delivered with the usual fastidious fanfare. Methodological issues: protocol: HCFC-23: SBSTA adopted short conclusions. (FCSTA/2006/L.23). Noting that the issue had not been resolved. I would imagine little gets resolved at conferences like this ever, with their inordinate bureaucracy and general obsequiousness - like a secular Tridentine mass for 21st Century globalization zealots. There is no place for dissent.

'The Nairobi Conference may not be remembered as one of the critical milestones when a major breakthrough occurred,' records the official UN summary benignly. Although perhaps, the report continues, it prepares the way for what some hope will be another 'momentous meeting' within the next four years.

'The conference has let Africa and the rest of the developing world down,' say Oxfam,

Maybe the conference has let down Oxfam and the other NGOs speaking on behalf of Africans, but some with a more critical understanding of what the conference can actually achieve are getting on with some practical direct action.

'We should not wait until Mombassa is under water,' says Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, at a conference side event. 'We know the problems. The problem that we have is what to do. What will make the difference is not the negotiations, but what we do when we go home.'

Known locally as 'the tree lady' due to her propensity to encourage Africans to plant trees, she is part of a movement whose aim is to plant our way out of the crisis. Trees perform as carbon sinks, inhaling CO2 and hence offsetting CO2 emissions: to re-forest Africa with a billion trees appropriate to regional diversity is the target of the Green Belt Movement.

3. Towards a Globalised New Orleans, or the End of Capitalism.

Many in the global north speculate upon the wisdom of having (more) children considering the nefarious world they may well inherit. People in the south - in places like drought-ridden northern Kenya - have the more pressing issue of wondering how they will feed their living children.

It seems a hopeless situation. Two thousand of the world's eminent scientists confirm that climate variability is a product of human activity, that we might have a short window of opportunity - say 15 years - to do something about it, but there isn't the political will to act amongst the powers that be. Not just the USA, China and Russia, but even European 'champions' of the cause refuse to set an example. While his government will say in the strongest terms it is 'an imperative' to take action to prevent further climate damage, British Prime Minister Tony Blair will still balk at personal sacrifices. 'I think these things are a bit impractical actually to expect people to do that,' said Blair in response to the suggestion that cutting back on flights might be a positive step. For him, science will save the planet. 'All the evidence is that if you use the science and the technology constructively, your economy can grow, people can have a good time but do so more responsibly.'

A conclusion shared by President Bush. 'Leaving behind the debate whether global warming is caused by natural or man-made causes,' said Bush chillingly to the New York Times (25/05/2006), 'we are going to focus solely in the technologies which can resolve the problem.' So Bush is saying that we don't so much as have a problem (that doesn't matter) but we don't have a solution. So what's on offer in terms of technological or scientific solutions to wean us off fossil fuels (and Muslim oil)?

The front runner is ethanol. But replacing fossil fuels - an intensely compact source of fuel - with crop derived bio-ethanol requires felling vast tracks of forest to make way for plantations, thereby creating even more ecological damage.

Meanwhile, entering into the twilight zone of capitalist solutions to capitalist problems, we find the resurrection of the old technological bogeyman: nuclear energy, or the new bio-technical Frankenstein: genetically modified bio-fuel crops. Both these solutions are low-carbon, but the potential ecological cost of the energy succeeds in merely pushing the climate change problem upriver a while.

Another solution involves juggling carbon around. With capitalism's love of the market we now have complicated emissions trading schemes for 'cost-effective' reductions in carbon emissions (selling them on) and more bizarrely, carbon drops - including the notions of storing emissions under the sea bed or down disused mine shafts.

Capitalism's last technological card and one that is proving a current growth business is geo-engineering - the intentional manipulation of the climate. Taking inspiration from the CIA's (unsuccessful) attempts to provoke intense rains over Vietnam to wash out the rebel crops, to the Chinese Olympic committee's promise to secure sunny days for the 2008 Olympics via technical measures, the geo-engineering industry is having a field day in the era of climate variability. From attempts to fertilise the ocean to lower the water temperature to filling the sky with sulphate nano-particles to intercept sun-rays, geo-engineering scientists are busy interfering with and intervening upon the climate, undeterred by potential disequilibrium disasters or mass contamination.

Beyond technological meddling, dealing with the problem of climate change - ecologically, politically, economically and socially - needs a lot more than the Kyoto Protocol, developing alternative energies or holding another emergency Climate Change Conference.

It is necessary to consider the root of the problem. A global economy based on the colossal demand for highly concentrated and rapidly depleting fossil fuel deposits is ecologically unsustainable. Do we need to change fuel or change the structure of consumption? But under the present model - global capitalism - is change possible, or even desirable?

'Capitalism has always relied on infinite expansionism in a finite planet,' explains Alex Troochi of the Green Apple Collective, 'something has to give and at the moment, it's the planet that's giving as Capitalism plunders ahead.'

Capitalism relies on ever-expanding markets and inputs to continue to make profits based on the extraction of natural resources and transforming them into dead capital. This ceaseless addiction to growth-for-growth sake leads inexorably to ecotastrophe. Capitalism is now being forced to consider other strategies. But the magic technological or scientific bullet to save the day remains illusive.

Hope lies beyond the pale; it requires a fundamental shift in thinking, a revolutionary paradigm shift away from the cloistered confines of the imagination of the United States government, the European Union or the United Nations assembly. In the long term, the human world will have to evolve some kind of post-capitalist society to survive.

The doomsday clock ticks away at a perilous five minutes to twelve. Meanwhile its still early morning on the revolutionary clock. Despite the alarm ringing, the revolutionary protagonist, although stirring, has yet to awake. The writing is on the wall once more - be realistic, demand the impossible.

Review* : Tales From the Underground (from an anti-Capitalist Everyman)

2006-10-06T18:01:00.000-07:00

Published in Red and Black Revolution Journal and first printed on Indymedia Ireland on the cusp of the Dublin Book launch, 5 October.
by D mcC

At this point in time it is a rare and welcome event when a book by an Irish activist is published and rarer still when a book by an Irish anti-capitalist writer receives widespread praise and acclaim. Clandestines: the Pirate journals of an Irish Exile, which has received a slew of positive reviews following it’s publication in the US by AK Press, is just such a rarity, and as it is being launched in Ireland this week means readers here will soon be able to make their own appraisal of the book. Although this is Ryan's first full length book many Indymedia readers may have already come across Ryan’s articles and essays before as the author is relatively well known and his work is included in probably two of the most notable collections of anti-capitalist writing of recent years- the Verso Press’ ‘We are Everywhere’ and Softskull Press’ ‘Confronting Capitalism.

“......the only thing that works is memory. Collective memory, but also even the tiniest, most insignificant memory of a personal kind. I suspect, in fact, that one can barely survive without the other, that legend cannot be constructed without anecdote” - Paco Ignacio Taibo II

Clandestines consists of a series of stories and reflections culled from Ryan’s experience of over twenty years of activism. The result is an entertaining and readable mixture of memoir, political essay, travelogue and literature. Clandestines then is not your standard political tract but rather a form of political picaresque documenting Ryan’s adventures as a wayward radical with an uncanny ability to find himself in interesting and often tricky situations everywhere from the mountains of Kurdistan to jungles of Chiapas. Ryan has certainly been around the block and the book includes a number of eyewitness accounts of events of major political and historical importance such as the massacre of mourners at a Republican funeral in Belfast by Michael Stone in 1988 and the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990.

However, Ryan is at his best when he is observing the everyday and the marginal rather than the epic and grandiose and much of the book is taken up with Ryan's descriptions of various encounters with people at the edges of history. These memorable character sketches, by turns affectionate and exasperated, often ironic and occasionally derisive, fill and enliven the pages of Clandestines. Ryan wanders amongst this motley crew-the generous and riotously joyful Berlin squatters, the Zapatista peasants, the disaffected Cubans, a drunk Croatian war veteran, the Central American gang members, a charismatic Venezuelan punk singer, the self indulgent hippies at a Rainbow Gathering and a host of others- observing, conspiring, joking and drinking and ultimately turning these encounters into a series of amusing and interesting tales without ever stretching the reader's credulity too far.

But Clandestines is more than a series of anecdotes about the ‘wretched of the earth’ and eccentrics from the activist milieu. In the most impressive sections of the book, like the chapter on life in a dismal Guatemalan backwater, Ryan manages to interweave these colourful and finely observed character portraits with a political analysis that outlines the sort of historical and social pressures that can shape, embolden or even crush the lives he describes.

Obviously enough this sort of writing is made possible by a libertarian sensibility that combines Utopian hope with a keen awareness of human fraility. In all of these essays we find an unresolved and creative tension between Ryan's attraction towards political romanticism that is tempered, undercut and sometimes completely usurped by an intelligent scepticism. This tension is one of main sources of the book’s constant ironies, pathos and humour but it does also mean that the reader is occasionally left with the impression that the author is sometimes uneasy with some of his own political rhetoric. On the other hand there are some sections in the book in which Ryan's storytelling is disturbed and subsumed by political analysis and in one particular chapter, on the Milltown massacre, this certainly undermines the quality and impact of the piece. However, for the most part Ryan gets the balance between right and this dynamic tension means the writing never degenerates into political liturgy or a disconnected series of anecdotes.

Despite the fact that Clandestines is a profoundly political book Ryan swerves away from answering in a systematic way the political questions that his varied experiences have thrown up. And these are pertinent and difficult questions for the anti-capitalist movement: for instance how should libertarians relate to national liberation struggles, how do we forge meaningful grassroots democracy, what is to be taken and what is to be dispensed with from the Marxist tradition, and most consistently Ryan’s poses questions about how solidarity is built between activists from the global north and those struggling in the global south. These issues are explored but left unresolved however it would be a mistake to believe this is because Ryan is either naive or unreflective. He clearly marks these issues over the course of his essays and understands their significance. Neither can this be attributed to a lack of interest in political theory as Clandestines is clearly influenced by the work of, amongst others, the radical historians Galeano, Linebaugh and Federici, the situationist theorist Vaneigem and of course the whimsical and passionate writings Sub-Commandante Marcos of the EZLN. It is also obvious from his analysis of Latin American politics and his critique of Kurdish Marxist guerillas that he has absorbed the best of libertarian thought right into his bones. Nonetheless, Ryan chooses to avoid neat and easy answers as he crisscrosses the Atlantic marking historical transitions, observing and organising, and chasing hope in the face of a whirlwind of neoliberal and imperialist destruction.

All the same, or perhaps because of this refusal, Ryan's singular account of an unusual activist life paradoxically serves as a metaphor for the anti-capitalist movement as a whole in all its contradictions. Ryan's tales trace the patterns of globalisation from below and his search for new political communities, his desire to sustain hope, his discovery of a new world in the making in a forgotten corner of Mexico, his questioning of how we can fruitfully anchor our own life stories within grand historical narratives, his suspicion of easy answers, even his celebration of glorious and seedy marginality makes him, despite his steadfast refusal of such roles, something close to an anti-capitalist Everyman.

If, for the most part, even Clandestines little imperfections are interesting the book does deserve unequivocal criticism in one small regard. Although Clandestines is quite nicely produced with evocative black and white photos and handdrawn maps it does suffer somewhat from poor quality editing-there are quite a few typos, the occasional repetition and most seriously of all a certain uneveness in parts of the book that could of been simply remedied by some simple revisions or minor excisions.

That said Clandestines is a lively, humourous and, at times, a touching book. At his best Ryan captures both the poetry of everyday moments and the roar of history and, to use a phrase from the book describing one of his acquaintances, Ryan as a writer often “emdodies what is seductive about the rebel mileu-smart, vigourous and passionately committed to some great mysterious ideal”

The Longest Night

2006-10-04T14:38:00.000-07:00

Nothing prepared me for the birthing process of our son and nothing ever will. I would imagine the Spanish inquisition torture chambers were of a similar make up. And I was only a spectator - I have never heard Ana talk of her birthing nightmare. But I will try to explain what I saw and felt. I have blocked most of it out for a long time, but here I will describe the part most easily recalled for me – my emotional response. (And a stern caveat: Having witnessed this at close hand, I’m not sure I would be strong enough or brave enough to have a baby. So this is a coward’s account).

Ixim was late. We were pretty sure he would pop out on Jan 1st, 2003, 9th anniversary of the Zapatista uprising especially when 20,000 Zapatistas came marching into town that day as we looked on in the overflowing plaza of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, our home. But no, he stayed put. Ana was huge, but in good spirits; no complications. We had a kind midwife on board to oversee proceedings – Dona Isabel was an indigenous Mayan woman who had delivered literally dozens of babies and subscribed to traditional methods. She didn’t think the baby was late although we were sure it was.

Almost 2 weeks later, the first contractions begin. 24 hours of chilling around the house ensues, playing cards and getting at once excited and then tensed up. It is a surreal, timeless period, in between worlds. Our hope is for a home birth here in our warm nest. Contractions come, and we all trip over each other with growing anticipation. The midwife checks Ana out and in her opinion, all is fine, we are on course for delivery. But midnight of day one passes and she still hasn't entered into proper labor. Around 3am that night, Ana is worried and we go to the local state hospital in downtown San Cristobal. All is fine, the hospital doctor says after a brief check-up, it was false labor - go back home and wait it out.

No sleep, and day two dawns, with contractions coming heavier. The midwife Dona Isabel still says its all fine. While Ana concentrates on breathing and exercises, I feel stuck in some kind of limbo territory. More chamomile tea, dear?

That evening it comes on strong. We will be here all night in our bedroom, with the midwife, her daughter, a close friend Katja, and a couple of women who had had their babies with this midwife and knew Ana - cheerleaders of a sort. All night Ana pushes and takes up different positions and still the contractions and dilations come, but no fundamental movement of that great mass in her belly occurs. Endless massaging and walking around in circles, squatting and words of encouragement. Ana is quite absent now, she has left us hours ago, so totally centered on her body and the pain and the task at hand is she. The room is becoming increasingly claustrophobic.

I'm spacing out too. Too much hurt, watching Ana in such pain, and feeling utterly powerless. This isn’t happening as everyone said it would. She has being 12 hours in hard labor, 2 whole days really since the contractions began, and now we are all disintegrating a bit. Something has gone wrong. Ana continues pushing and breathing and concentrating on the massive shift in her body as six or seven of us focus on her belly, collectively willing that child to come out. 12 hours of intense willing. But the child isn’t coming.

“By the grace of God it will all be fine,” insists the midwife, optimistically. My doubts are creeping in - this is Dona Isabels first interracial birth, I'm thinking. Maybe she underestimates the size of the child – I am so much bigger than Ana. Or maybe the problem is the lateness of the child. Who knows, but when anybody starts to summon God's will in what should be a straight medical procedure, I hear alarm bells ringing. But what do I know? Dona Isabel is the experienced midwife.

“By the grace of God,” she insisted, “it’ll come.”
Around midnight, by the grace of a car, a doctor of sorts comes, and he puts a lid on the spiritual reveries.
“This is a critical situation”, he says, as he assesses the strange mucus coming out of Ana.
“Get her to hospital immediately.”

Fuck. We piled into Katja’s Volkswagen beetle and drive to San Cristobal’s general hospital, the emergency room. All is quiet. The anonymous people in white take her away with some urgency. The doctor comes out and says “Why didn’t you bring her in before this!” somewhat appalled. We came in last night! we say. “Who could have possibly told her to go home again!” he says exasperated.

Off he goes to perform the emergency Caesarian. The midwife exits, along with her entourage. I am confused as to what to say to her because, despite her being a lovely woman and very supportive all along, I am veering towards the opinion that ultimately her advice to wait it out and her insistence that by the grace of God it would turn out fine could have damaged both mother and child. But I don’t say anything – because what do I know anyhow? I get the feeling she is pissed off that the doctors have interceded. It is not appropriate in our circles to criticize anything pertaining to traditional Mayan medicine and cosmological things. Thank you, I said to her, probably somewhat unconvincingly.

So ironically for all our plans for a natural home birth, and indeed, leanings towards the traditional, it is modern medicine that saves the life of our child, and probably Ana’s too. But I soon learn to not trust one inch this modern hospital either.

Katja our friend and I wait in the waiting room from deep night to dawn. Around 5am Katja reports hearing a baby’s cry from the operating theater direction, as I return from my umpteenth visit to the bathroom. We wait excitedly. A boy, says a passing cleaning woman and that is all we know. The health of both mother and child unknown. At 9 am I am still sitting there in the waiting room without further confirmation. The doctor is putting his coat and leaving the building when I ambush him and ask him what was going on.
“Oh”, he says, casually. “Did nobody tell you? Difficult but ok, baby and mother alive.”
He tells me as if it was a football result. He doesn’t give a shit, and why should he? - its just his job. Off he goes.

The complete ineptness of the staff means that nobody can tell me anything further or even locate the two. Can I go see them? No, its against hospital rules, they tell me, but someone will come out and inform you. Visiting is between 11-12, they inform me. I can’t believe it. They won’t let me in. This hospital is overlorded with an infuriating paternalistic attitude : everything is in our hands, you just wait there and all will be sorted out in good time.

I am livid. Where is my fucking child and how is he? I get no response. It’s been over 4 hours since his birth and I still don’t know what’s going on. The mother is asleep - she’s OK - is all they’ll say. The baby is in an incubator somewhere. So now I have to track down my baby. Katja goes off to get us some breakfast and I sneak around the hospital trying to locate him. He is somewhere, but no one can or will tell me where.

I bluff my way past a guard and door-step a doctor near the baby sector.
“How is my baby?” I demand.
“He is …progressing”, he say vaguely. “We are monitoring him.”

I hustle my way into the chilling, antiseptic baby infirmary. I am presented with the macabre and terrifying vision of 5 or 6 plastic transparent boxes with tiny creatures inside them, each connected to a variety of tubes.

“Which is my son?” I ask, my voice trembling.
“That one, I think,” says one of the nurses, nonchalantly, pointing at the biggest one. “You shouldn’t be here”.

I remember the first sight I had of my child. He seems a good size, but he is a strange green shade, hooked up with an IV in his arm, as well as having some other tubes stuffed down his throat. He is lying in an unnatural position and obviously in pain, looking upset. His lungs, explains the nurse, are full of gunk from the over-extended pregnancy.

My heart breaks in two to look upon this tiny little naked thing so helpless and so utterly unprepared for this harsh plastic and bright strip-lighting world he has been thrown into. From the gorgeous womb to this artificial hell, being kept alive by ugly plastic tubes. Such trauma for a newborn child!

“He will be OK,” said a doctor walking in, as he begins to explain a bit. His words wash over me and I can’t take my gaze from the smallest, most humble human I have ever seen, struggling to survive. I stare, and feel like crying but also, conversely, overjoyed. He has got this far, and look at him, his little breathing body, his translucent chest, not even the size of my clenched fist, beating vigorously and his big eyes… they are beautiful. It’s going to be OK.

Ana is conked out somewhere else in the hospital, her whereabouts unknown to me. And her child in this fucking plastic box under bare strip lighting. It is heartbreaking stuff.

“You have to leave,” says a voice.
“I’m not fucking leaving..”

I want to stay by my son, protect him, look after him, even in this plastic box. He needs me! I open the little door on the side of the incubator and touch his tiny greenish hand. He reacts and grasps my finger ever so slightly. I feel him garnering his tiny strength and responding to human touch. Of course! - in this plastic purgatory to touch human flesh is a saving grace. Between tears and smiles, I speak to him. I’m sure his face registered the familiar voice from the 9 months inside the womb.

“You’re going to be fine, Ixim,” I told him, “we’ll take care of you.”

I silently curse this grossly inhuman set-up while at the same time recognizing that he is in critical condition and it is hence necessary. Most of all, here he is, the one who took so long to arrive, who in the darkest moments of the previous night I had thought was a lost cause, here he is and he is, despite his perilous state, alive and ... cherished. I try to let him know that, touching his tiny hand. I desperately want him to know that he is not alone.

But I have to care for Ana too – who knows what could be happening to her in this inquisition torture unit. I locate her in a long, ubiquitous recovery ward with lots of indigenous women convalescing after giving birth, some with their babies, some not. As I approach the bed, Ana stirs. She is still groggy from the general anesthetic and the operation. Confused, she doesn’t know where she is or quite what has happened. She looks distressed.

“You have a beautiful little baby boy,” I tell her, and her look of quiet confusion turns fleetingly into a radiant smile.

“Is everything Ok?” she whispers.
“Yes,” I said, not going into details, and we embrace.

These fuckers of course hadn’t told her anything. They had also let her drip run dry. A nurse passes by.

“You let the IV go empty!” she scolds , as if it was Ana's fault. I'm sure that this nurse is overworked and underpaid, but I hated her then at that moment.

A while later, I brought Ana around in a wheel chair to see Ixim. She was still somewhat absent from the drugs, like an old person with Parkinson. She gazed at her child for the first time in the plastic box with quiet, rapt wonder. The baby moved his head in the direction of her presence. She moved her finger into the little side door and touched him. Despite the wheelchair, her groggy state and the green-ish baby in the godforsaken incubator, there was a strange and terrific rush of energy, and mother and child re-connected. I watched quietly and cried.

Not the picture perfect birth one imagines, quite a fucking nightmare actually, and so many contradictions there within. These people who were treating us so uncompassionately – devils at this stage in my eyes - who were blocking our every move, were the same ones who held the life of our child in their hands. Of course its not their fault, it’s the system. This is the state hospital, government run, free. Were the conditions similar in the expensive private hospital up the road? Of course not.

“You are not meant to be in here,” said a nurse.
“I’m his mother,” explained Ana, as if she should have to explain.

I was remarkably strung out and an emotional wreck to boot at this stage, but I still managed to dwell upon the thought of how Ana might feel at this moment having carried this child for 9 long months next to her heart.

What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, or madder.

@ 2008

Clandestines Review.
Village magazine, Ireland, September 2006.

The revolution starts now
by Michael McCaughan
Thursday, September 21, 2006
^^Michael McCaughan looks at two sets of memoirs written from the front lines of global battlefields by witnesses who join the revolution with no agenda other than their passion and idealism
Brigadista: An Irishman’s Fight Against Fascism. By Bob Doyle. Published by Currach Press, €14.99
Clandestines: the pirate journals of an Irish exile. By Ramor Ryan. Published by AK Press, €14

The nation's book-shelves are creaking with radical ideas these days. Writers like Noam Chomsky and Greg Palast enjoy mainstream exposure at a time of deepening public scepticism over the course of world affairs.
However, it is much harder to find contemporary memoirs which take the reader to the heart of today's global battlefields by participants who are neither UN workers nor NGO delegates applying Band-Aids to matters of grave urgency and social justice. It is rare to find witnesses who owe nothing to anyone and who join foreign conflicts in a spirit of self-sacrifice and idealism.
Some good examples of the genre include Gioconda Belli's The Country Under my Skin; Stuart Christie's Granny made me an Anarchist and the captivating Nor meekly serve my time, which takes the reader on an unpleasant journey into the H-Blocks in the company of some of its former residents.
So it is heartening to discover new books in which Irish rebels who have travelled beyond these shores share their wisdom upon return.
Bob Doyle is a veteran of the international brigades who fought fascism in Spain during the civil war, risking his life for his ideals.
Ramor Ryan is half-a-century younger and motivated by similar ideals. He visited dozens of hot-spots around the globe, from Kurdish guerrilla camps to a Croatian Rainbow Gathering, always striving to understand radical experiments, his role shifting from observer to activist.
Both men have penned their experiences in two fascinating books which combine action and reflection to give a profound insight into the human condition.
Bob Doyle's Brigadista: An Irishman's Fight Against Fascism begins in Dublin in the era of worker struggle and general poverty in 1916. One of five children, his mother was "confined as a religious lunatic" to Grangegorman asylum and his father shovelled coal at sea. He spent nine years with the Sisters of Charity, who allowed no contact whatsoever with his family.
As a teenager, Doyle found work as a houseboy for a wealthy family and soon became active in the struggle for workers' rights. His growing awareness took him to Spain, where thousands of foreign volunteers took up arms to defend the republic. Doyle was on the front line, and was lucky not to be killed as his comrades were cut down beside him.
Captured, he was sent to a concentration camp where starvation rations barely kept him alive as he awaited his inevitable execution. He escaped with his life, on agreement that he would never return to Spain. Before long however, he was back in the country, secretly raising funds for prisoners' relatives and passing messages to the anti-fascist resistance.
In sharp contrast, Ramor Ryan came of age in the 1980s, a self-styled "idle youth" dispatched northwards to witness the funeral of three IRA volunteers shot dead in Gibraltar. The Dublin he leaves behind in Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile is "a grey, depressing place – populated by cynics and alcoholics, soggy from the relentless drizzle". The subsequent murders at Milltown cemetery proved a wake-up call and Ryan is suddenly faced with the significance of commitment and struggle.
From the outset, Ryan is brutally honest with himself, wondering why on earth he is attending these funerals. His response – "it feels necessary" – paraphrases Orwell's observations in Homage to Catalonia where he accounts for his journey into the unknown as simply something that any decent person would do in the circumstances.
In this respect, Ryan and Doyle are worlds apart. Doyle, the Spanish Civil War veteran, was a true believer in the communist cause, willing to overlook contradictions and crimes in the name of a higher freedom. But he was his own man too, and acted on his own initiative, following whatever path his dignity dictated.
An excellent add-on to Brigadista sees Doyle's two sons reflect on their father. This can be a touchy area, since activist fathers have a habit of leaving children and partners behind in their struggle to save the world. Robert and Julian are reconciled to their father's socialist principles, but they also have sharp words to say about some aspects of their upbringing.
In 1958, at the height of the Notting Hill Carnival riots (no, I hadn't heard of them either), Doyle takes his sons out in a van and drives around the area, offering a lift home to frightened West Indians.
These spontaneous acts of selflessness typify the spirit of Bob Doyle. The same spirit is echoed in the pages of Ryan's moving memoir. He writes of the global citizen's movement, publicly deployed in Seattle, Prague and Genoa, which was busy making a difference off the mainstream radar in places like Chiapas and Belize. In south-east Mexico, Ryan joins international volunteers to staff civil-observation camps, which acted as a buffer to a massive army presence surrounding Zapatista rebel villages. These idealists, often derided as over-privileged and ineffectual 'revolutionary tourists', were getting a fast-track education on the price of freedom and rebellion.
Ryan, meanwhile, seemed to have a guardian angel hovering above his head. He took a break from his observation duties just hours before a major military assault in which three Norwegian observers were beaten, slung into a truck and expelled from the country as "pernicious foreigners" before the army got down to the serious business of sacking homes and beating locals who offered resistance. He returned to help the community pick up the pieces, and learned that struggle is as much about defeat as about victory.
Bob Doyle would undoubtedly agree with this appraisal. In Brigadista, he describes decades spent trying to win formal recognition for the sacrifices made by international volunteers and the many thousands of Spanish who were tortured and killed by Franco's thugs. The long march from disdain to respect, which culminates in the decision to honour the international brigade veterans with Spanish citizenship, is one of the most impressive tales in his book.
Ryan, meanwhile, brings a breath of fresh air to the struggle for social justice. He started his own activist path as a squatter in Berlin, where the Autonomen, or Black Bloc rebels, celebrated mayday with mayhem and a ritual battle against the police. This was a useful laboratory of combat tactics for someone fleeing the stifling Dublin atmosphere and seeking new horizons.
Ryan's prose is assured and his adventures unfold across the pages with comic timing and flair, hinting at an emerging literary talent. At times, it is hard to believe that the events in this book really happened. Just a look at some of the chapter titles will illustrate: 'Sex and the Berlin Wall'; 'The Resurrection of Vampiro' and the 'Chicken Bus Diaries'.
Ryan is also a member of a new generation of Irish emigrants for whom sex, rebellion and adventure is all within the job description, and he flirts and bluffs his way in and out of dangerous situations. At times you wish someone would kick his arse, but mostly you cheer him on. There are also important reflections on the nature of revolution and radical change, with lessons from Nicaragua and Cuba underscoring the need for critical distance even in times of revolutionary fervour.
Ryan shrewdly observes the manner in which revolutionaries, once they are in power, reproduce the vices of the ousted regime. This book will not please anyone who wants certainties, as the more Ryan learns, the less he seems sure of – as befits an open mind on a journey without borders. There are few happy endings and lots of messy beginnings, a reminder that change can take generations to take root.
Strangely, in this book of causes, the strongest chapter is a whimsical stop-over in a grim Guatemalan port, where Ryan encounters desperate housewives dreaming of the USA and an escape from their mundane existence.
Ryan writes with compassion and avoids the temptation to judge others by some futile yardstick of political worthiness. This book should be obligatory reading for the Socialist Workers Movement and other lifeless lefty drones.
Colombia's best known guerrilla commander, Jaime Bateman, said, "La revolución es una fiesta." These are two books you can dance to.

International Solidarity in the Light of Global Resistance

2006-09-02T15:23:00.000-07:00

Of quaint metaphysical constructs conjured up in an exotically distant jungle where pipe smoking poet gods and indomitable corn-people hold an illusive holy grail of rebel hope that renders you spellbound until you leave the mystical space, and then disappears - like a sieve fisted find.

by Ramor Ryan

From Perspectives, January 2006

It was thrilling to wake up in Dublin on Jan 1st 1994 to the news of the Zapatista uprising in Mexico. It quickly became clear that this was a new kind of Latin insurgency that superseded the ideological straightjacket of the Cold War era, and embraced a whole new formulation of how to start a revolution. Sub Comandante Marcos was standing in the centre square of San Cristobal talking a more enlightened form of liberation than had been articulated before. Gone was the old Leninist language and as we learned soon enough - ways of organizing. For anarchists across the globe, it was as if all their Christmases had come at once. An apparently anti-authoritarian leaning peasant guerrilla army who rising up against an International neo-liberal trade agreement! Their red and black flag! And with those old rifles and antiquated uniforms, they even had a passing resemblance to the Spanish Anarchist militias of 1936!!!

I would have been out on the first plane to Chiapas ready to join the insurgency, except the financial limitations of the Irish dole were such that it would be a full year before I finally got there. My mate Mick did manage to get out to Chiapas within two weeks of the uprising. His first letter back was exhaultant (no email in those days): anarchists from all over Mexico, the States and indeed, everywhere, were already converging on the rebel zone to seek out a role to play in this new devastatingly exciting and urgent uprising.

I had caught the last few months of the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, before they were deposed of power in Feb. of 1990. Picking coffee with a Sandinistas collective and teaching English to a Sandinistas class I cut my teeth as an international solidarity volunteer. It was very rewarding for me, but I had to leave my Anarchy back at home – the Sandinista revolution was leftist and authoritarian and harbored no Anarchist faction, indeed promoted a line that was distinctly unfriendly to such a current of thought. Nevertheless, there were elements of the Sandinista program – their anti-imperialism, their grass roots support of peoples’ education and health, as well as their lack of ideological rigidity allowed space for anarchists of my ilk (of which there were quite a few working in the country) to take part a little on the side.

The early nineties saw me traveling further into this tumultuous political space of Latin America, involving myself in anti-capitalist campaigns in Colombia (multinational exploitation) and Belize (Union recognition for Banana workers). But it was the Zapatista Uprising that sealed my fate, and ensured my presence intermittently but unrelentingly for the ensuing 10 years. Much of the time I involved myself in the Zapatista struggle working in the category designated international solidarity.

In response to the Mexican military advances on the rebel zone, the Zapatistas put out a call in 1995 for volunteers to come and place themselves at the front line of conflict – human shields as such. Our group, the Irish Mexico Group went one sep further- we set up a solidarity encampment in one such front line community, called 10 de Abril, (a cattle farm occupied by 70 Zapatista families) and attempted to do consolidate a more interactive role in the community. Volunteers busied themselves in the fields, in the classrooms and brought in resources for development projects. The goal was to stand shoulder to shoulder as companeros, not solely as human shields. The harvest of this day to day solidarity work became apparent later in 1998, when the Mexican military violently invaded the community, and after the first wave of volunteers got grabbed and deported by the authorities (thereby rising the profile of the incident to an international story), the remaining volunteers were offered the choice by the EZLN of confronting the military together in the tactical self-defense of the community. A level of trust and confidence between Zapatistas and foreigners had been forged that allowed for such an unusual intimacy of shared struggle.

The problem with international solidarity is that at its most effective it’s a tactical deployment and as it develops into a long term strategy, it looses its urgency. When the red alert is sounded, and the urgent action communiqués are sent out, people can react with the appropriate militant agency. But protracted struggles have a tendency to last for interminable years, and international solidarity activists come and go. “ Campamentistas are the people who leave,” lamented one Zapatista, “and we can never leave.“ The privilege of those who can step into a dangerous conflict zone for a finite time and then leave as the mood dictates. It is a poignant reminder of the inherent and inescapable inequalities involved, of the almost insurmountable contradictions there within and a cause for understandable resentment for some at the coalface of the struggle.

Nevertheless, the Zapatistas have recognized and lauded the involvement of international solidarity within the rebel zone ( “those born on other soil who add their heart to the struggle for a peace with justice and dignity”, according to Marcos) – from restraining the excesses of military and paramilitary aggression as human shields to introducing useful development projects in the form of potable water systems, solar energy supply, technologically appropriate means of communication, pirate radio, organic horticulture etc. From the other side, the Chiapas pilgrimage has become almost a rite of passage for activists from the Global North. The influence and inspiration is apparent at every global mobilization and in every activist space. As renowned Mexican writer and political analyst Gustavo Esteva has pointed out -“ Zapatismo is nowadays the most radical, and perhaps the most important, political initiative in the world.”

But the space of international solidarity has been abused in many ways, even in the hallowed environs of Chiapas. Too many people were climbing on the backs of the Zapatistas to promote their own NGO outfit, to garner salaries from international funders for posts that should be occupied by locals, or at least rendered unnecessary after a short length of time. Too many people were using the space opened up by authentic international solidarity to write their beautiful journalist pieces, their splendid thesis, to make that startling documentary and then forgetting their impassioned zapatismo before moving onto the next career move. The Zapatistas moved to stem the abuses of the solidarity space by introducing the Juntas de Buen Gobierno (Good Government Committees) in 2003 to oversee all projects and outside involvement in the rebel zone. It has been a success, despite the increased bureaucracy and the 10% revolutionary tax levied on all solidarity projects in the autonomous municipalities.

As the Zapatistas struggle enters its 26th year of this phase of struggle, tactical and strategic mistakes have been made and more will be made in the future. As learned from the ideological demise of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, it is folly to fetishize and offer unconditional support for the host organization or movement. This is why the Zapatistas demand not solidarity from its international consorts, but allegiance to the idea and inspiration of zapatismo. Be a Zapatista wherever you are, they say. When asked what was the best contribution to the Zapatista struggle internationals could make, an old Zapatista said “More Seattle’s...”

So the Zapatistas turn the equation upside down - international solidarity becomes a means to export a rebel philosophy. Let zapatismo be an inspiration and encouragement to develop your own form of rebel autonomy. International solidarity is brought down from the grandstands of cheering 3rd World anti-imperialist and national liberation struggles, to the playing field of actually building global autonomy.

This kind of stuff is music to the ears for anarchists and anti-authoritarians – constructing global autonomy, horizontalidad and mandar obedeciendo (to govern obeying), surely blueprints for a global wide insurgency?! And then they return “home” to New York, Barcelona, Montreal or Dublin, and it seems hopeless – like there is nothing to build on, no local autonomy, and no radical movements and zapatismo seems like some quaint metaphysical construct conjured up in an exotically distant jungle where pipe smoking poet gods and indomitable corn-people hold an illusive holy grail of rebel hope that renders you spellbound until you leave the mystical space, and then disappears - like a sieve fisted find.

Or as Old Antonio used to say - perhaps not.

The Writer as Freedom Fighter, the Freedom Fighter as Writer

2006-09-02T15:03:00.000-07:00

If our real desire is to destroy global capitalism, when is the time to propagate the word and when is the time to act?

Review of True Crimes : Rodolfo Walsh- The Life and Times of a Radical Intellectual, by Michael McCaughan.( Latin American Bureau : 2002)
Our Word is Our Weapon, The Collected Writings of Sub Commandante Marcos, Edited by Juana Ponce de Leon. (Seven Stories : 2001)
(Perspectives)

If our real desire is to destroy global capitalism, when is the time to propagate the word and when is the time to act? Is there a time when the word becomes mute and actions speak louder? And when is the time that action should once more be subsumed by the word? Such strategic and tactical questions of praxis underlie the life work of the subjects of these two books. Both Rodolfo Walsh and Sub Commandante Marcos write and fight, the one with the 1970´s Argentinian Montonero guerrilla, the other with the EZLN, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. Interestingly, the former began as a writer and ended as a guerrilla fighter. The latter, Marcos, began as a guerrilla fighter and now, his rifle becoming rusty, continues ostensibly as a practitioner of the word..

Rodolfo Walsh - The Writer As Freedom Fighter.

Why would the life of a Argentinian leftist guerrilla of an 1970´s armed struggle be of interest to Anti-Authoritarians or Anarchists ? In Argentina today, heady times filled with revolutionary passion, Walsh´s name is one of the very few from that era that still holds currency amongst the contemporary radicals. Unlike Che, he has not been reified into a popular icon, and unlike other well known radical intellectuals of the era, like Regis Debray, he never compromised politically or intellectually - for which he was shot down in the streets of Buenos Aires in 1977 by state assassins. In a time of total war against the popular movement, Walsh is remembered for his integrity - an unassuming, modest, behind-the-scenes player, but a pivotal figure in the secret revolutionary history of the era. Michael McCaughan makes direct comparisons between Walsh and Sub Commandante Marcos. Both pioneer the radical use of the word as a weapon, alongside their guns, to bring down dictators. The Zapatista slogan Everything for everybody, nothing for ourselves, is equated to Walsh´s notion of "living for others" (McCaughan p. 300).

I would add a further comparison - Walsh as a revolutionary did not fight to seize power, but to fight power as represented by the dictatorship.He fought and wrote inspired by notions of justice and political and economic freedom for the multitudes. Upon his death, he was fighting for freedom on two fronts - against the dictatorship, and against the authoritarian Montonero leadership. Michael McCaughan's work is well researched , erudite and passionate. As well as presenting 21 of Walsh's seminal literary works (many translated into English for the first time) he has written a thorough biography of the man using diaries, writings, interviews with family, friends and comrades. This methodology works well, and we are presented a more complete picture of the man - as writer, lover, father, journalist, organiser, ranking officer and combatant with the guerrillas.

Walsh (b.1927) comes across as a man who has lived many lives. Already an accomplished and renowned literary figure in his native Argentina, his book Operacion Massacre (1957) a continual best-seller ( "the finest Argentinian narrator of his generation," according to Eduardo Galeano ), he took off in 1959 to join in the Cuban Revolution. It was a time of endless revolutionary optomism. Another world seemed possible; seizing power was only a guerrilla foco away . Walsh´s activist life spanned this cycle from the euphoria of the early sixties cumulating in the ecstatic ´68 explosion, through the ensueing rollback, and terminating in the brutal repression of the seventies. His role in Cuba was to help develop an international, alternative news service to challenge the hegemony of the established news syndicates. A small group of young, inexperienced radical activists started up Prensa Latina, a media initiative that spread across the continent, opening offices in a variety of countries. Volunteers working day and night in cramped offices, using borrowed, donated and stolen equipment, the chaos and energy described by McCaughan sounds like any present day Indymedia office. Walsh watched with dismay as the authoritarian Cuban state, copperfastening control to combat the counter-revolution and the threat of US intervention, clamped down on the freedom of the journalists to write as they saw fit. The original vibrancy and enthusiasm around the Prensa Latina project was stifled and by 1961, the agency was little more than a mouthpiece for the regime. Unwilling to work under such restrictive circumstances, and as his sign of protest, Walsh left Prensa Latina and Cuba, somewhat discouraged, but still a strong advocate of the Revolution in general.

And such was Rodolfo Walsh´s militant stance throughout his life - he remained loyal and steadfast in his work and contribution to the dominant revolutionary forces of the day, but offered a critical voice against authoritarian tendencies and abuses of power within the organisation. And this position explains in some sense why, of all the revolutionary groups operating in Argentina, he choose to join the Peronist Montoneros. General Peron in power (1946-55) had exercised a particular form of populism that was influenced by Italian fascism but successfully presented itself as the defender of the working class. To understand the hysterical mass popularity of Peronism, its important to realise that before Peron's "popular" dictatorship, Argentina functioned as a kind of feudal system, the majority condemned to a form of servitude and oblivion. Peron bestowed upon the masses a sense of self-dignity and a few crumbs from the countries rich banquet. He was deposed by a tyrannical and paranoid military junta who, representing the upper-classes, viewed Peron as some kind of despot of the masses who would open the door to complete "anarchy".

Opposition to the Military Junta formed itself into the broad-front "Peronist" opposition. The Montoneros defined themselves during a violent split with the mainstream Peronist opposition in the early 70´s as a radical left-wing national liberation movement, influenced by the Cuban revolution. However, the catastrophic and appalling disaster of a guerrilla movement that emerged - ideologically confused, vanguardist and authoritarian - was not the answer to anything except getting everyone killed. Here is not the place to undertake a full analysis of the Montoneros. Suffice to say they are as about close to anti-authoritarian or anarchist positions as the IRA in Ireland, the ANC in the anti-apartheid struggle or the Sandinistas of pre-revolutionary Nicaragua. Nevertheless, like the three above mentioned groups, it would be folly to dismiss the Montoneros out of hand, without taking into account that they represented the main revolutionary current in that particular moment in history in Argentina. Indeed, the Montoneros were the largest guerrilla movement in Latin America and commanded the broadest popular support amongst the people who opposed the brutal murderous dictatorship. Anarchists, lacking a mass popular base since the Spain in the 1930´s, have generally positioned themselves on the margins of the broad national liberation movements, offering conditional ( and highly critical) support against the common enemy. Otherwise they would run the risk of losing the prestige of being a foot-note in these historical struggles.

In a complicated and convoluted history that saw the triumphant return of Peron in 1973, his subsequent death a few months later, and the Military coup in 1976, heralding a veritable genocide of the popular forces (30,000 killed or disappeared by the military junta 1976- 1983), McCaughan struggles to keep the reader abreast the situation. Walsh's position as an militant within the Montonero movement was defined by the exigencies of the situation. "I have to say that I am a Marxist, but a poor Marxist because I dont read much. I dont have time for ideological formation. My political culture is empirical rather than abstract. I prefer to draw my inferences from daily life. I throw myself into life on the street, into reality, and then I join that information to an ideological basis which is fairly clear in my mind." (McCaughan, p 200). The daily life faced by the Argentinian radical in these times, a simple matter of life and death, was dictated by the extremist ideology of the junta and the subsequent 30,000 casualties, leaving little time or space for profound ideological formation. "A terrorist is not just someone with a bomb or a gun, but also someone who spreads ideas that are contrary to Western and Christian Civilisation". General Jorge Rafael Videla, Head of the Military Junta. (Nunca Mas, a report by the National Commission on Disappeared People). The government´s total war on the people (a war replicated in Pinochet's Chile, in Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and needless to say fully supported by the CIA), left Walsh's position as union organiser and journalist in the worker´s paper Semanario CGT untenable. Most of his co-trade unionists were jailed or disappeared. His subsequent post as a journalist with the left-wing Noticias daily newspaper also sunk into grotesque farce, as the offices got bombed, journalists were imprisoned, distribution agents disappeared and eventually (mercifully?!), the newspaper was shut down by order of the courts.

All other roads closed, he went underground. Events are what matter these days, wrote Walsh, but rather than write about them we should be making them happen....(McCaughan, p 203. ) The word had become anathema to him. This renowned writers ´defection´ to the propaganda-by-deed tradition shocked Latin America. Here was a renowned writer, in earlier days equated with Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges, sacrificing the word for the gun. "These are different times...." he told a comrade, "and this is a time for a bigger undertaking. When you´re trying to change important things, then you realise that a short story, a novel, aren´t worth it and wont satify you. Beatiful bourgeois art! ....But when you have people who give their lives and continue to give them, literature is no longer your loyal and sweet lover - its a cheap whore. There are times when every spectator is a coward or a traitor."

Strong words of a combatent, forced into a position of total resistance. And yet in reality Walsh never let go of the word. Even at the height of his active service with the guerrilla , he also organised ANCLA, Argentina´s Clandestine News Agency. ANCLA attempted to monitor the avalanche of disappearances, murders and general mayhem generated by the Military Coup. As a kind of Amnesty International Urgent Action bulletin, it functioned well until most of the team were murdered. And as a Montonero Intelligence Officer, he acted implacably with a soldier´s ruthlessness. His network of revolutionary agents infiltrated the police and army. He was pivotal in an audacious 1976 guerrilla operation which involved placing a bomb in the police headquarters canteen, killing 42 guards. The military reprisals were predictably swift, beginning with the execution of 30 key prisoners that very evening and continuing afterwards with hundreds of assassinations and disappearances. McCaughan suggests that the harsh reaction to this bombing, as well as the death of his daughter Vikki while on Montonero active service, caused Walsh to rethink his role and criticise the wisdom of tactics that invited such huge reprisals. Instead of one-off spectacular attacks, he argued in favour of multiple small attacks, using whatever weapon at hand, whether it be the printing machine, popular culture, the pistol or the pipe bomb. Walsh assumed a heretical position within the guerrilla organisation; he questioned the authority of the leadership and dared to formulate a new strategy. The Montoneros were the sole resistance movement still fighting by late 1976 (foot-note 1.). Reminiscent of British Generals ordering their troops over the trenches towards the German machine gun turrets, the Montonero leadership ordered the remaining militants to continue fighting. By 1979 the Montoneros were destroyed, militarily, politically and spiritually. Walsh was just one more fallen soldier in the slaughter on the Argentinian battle fields.
"The Satanic
and antidialectical
is
that in the armed struggle
its they who have the arms."
(Ominous Thought, Efrain Huerta)

The Bridge from Walsh to Marcos.

" The typewriter is a weapon.... It can be a fan or a pistol.... With a typewriter and a piece of paper you can move people in unbelievable ways." - Walsh (McCaughan,p. 177)
Amongst the carnage that consumed Argentina from 1973 until his death in 1977 (The Years of Lead), Walsh's legacy was not his guerrilla endevours but his continued use of the word as a weapon against the military dictatorship. In his final year Walsh was openly critical of the strategy of the Montonero leadership, While the Montoneros still had major popular support, that support was hemmoraging. The public grew war-weary as the Montonero´s pursued their suicidal armed struggle to defeat the regime. Walsh recognised this fatal separation between the organisation and the support base and argued for class war in place of all-out military confrontation.
"We must be more self critical and realistic. Of course there is a class struggle, there always has been, and always will be, but one of the big successes of the government has been to wage war on us, not on the people as a whole. And this is largely due to our own mistakes, we isolate ourselves with ideology and our lack of political proposals for the ordinary people." (McCaughan, p. 260)
Whether out of inspiration or despair it´s unclear, but he returned to his original craft - that of a writer. After 7 long years focusing soley on popular and armed struggle, the muse returned with vengance and in his final days he wrote, amongst other works, a seminal prose essay which directly challenged the military government. The title of the piece was Open Letter from a Writer to the Military Junta and it skillfully attacked the dictatorship with an arsenal of reason, facts and moral certitude. It would be his most lasting contribution to the struggle and his most effective act of resistance. This was not a work of propaganda sanctioned by the Montoneros, but his own individual contribution as a writer. On the eve of his death, he comes around full circle - from writer to militant to guerrilla fighter and back again finally, to writer.
The first anniversary of the latest military junta has been marked by many official documents and speeches evaluating the governments activities over the past year; what you call successes are failures, the failures you recognise are crimes and the disasters you have committed are omitted altogether.... (McCaughan p 284) He outlines the true crimes of the regime, the murders, disappearances and tortures which elevate the level of human rights abuses to the barbaric, as well as the economic devastation wreaked by their clientalist policies upon the population. His stated aim was to "bear witness in difficult times" but instead he succeeds in delivering his most effective blow against the regime. And his tactical deployment of literature to bring down dictators did not go unnoticed.

Fast-forward, 15 years. A clandestine guerrilla sits meditating over a prose essay which directly challenges the Mexican dictatorship. No doubt his companeros thought it strange, that the commander spent some much time writing, when there was so much to prepare for the planned insurrection. Marcos´ 1992 essay, A Storm and a Prophecy - Chiapas: the Southeast in Two Winds, (Ponce de Leon, p.22) appears like a bridge between the failure of past revolutionary projects, and a new formulation of struggle. The word, alongside the pistol, alongside popular power, would take central place in Mexico´s revolutionary struggle.

Sub Commandante Marcos- The Freedom Fighter As Writer.

As Walsh fell, gunned down by the regimes assassin's in 1977, Mexico was undergoing its own little slaughter as the state eliminated the threat of subversive groups with a similar vigour. Still, considering the repressive political climate overseen by the PRI dictatorship (the governing party, Institutionalised Revolutionary Party, in power uninterrupted since the 1920´s), the path of armed resistance continued to be attractive to elements of the politicised youth. A student called Rafael Guillen in Tampico heard the calling. By 1979, he was integrated as "Capitan" in the ranks of the doomed guerrilla outfit, grandiosely called the National Liberation Forces (FLN). An old-school Marxist group, they subscribed to the vanguardist idea of igniting a popular uprising through armed struggle. As the guerrilla´s militants were killed off one by one, the survivors formulated a new tactical direction, Maoist in inspiration. They would uproot themselves from their familiar urban surroundings, and sink themselves into the ranks of the rural poor, agitating for armed revolution. This strategic path led Rafael Guillen and a few of his mates to Chiapas, to the indigenous communities, the poorest of all Mexican poor. And crucially, a proud people despite their eternal dispossession, with a long history of rebellion.

And so began a story that we are all now familiar with: the young Marxist guerrilla agitator was reborn in the mountains of the south-east as Sub Commandante Marcos. But you wouldn't know any of this basic history from the book Our Word Is Our Weapon. Instead the editor chooses to go along with the myth that Marcos was "born" on the 1st Jan 1994. The 101 communiqués printed here are accompanied by an Introduction and two essays from distinguished writers (foot-note 2). One might have expected, in the first complete English language edition of the collected writings of Sub Commandante Marcos, some kind of contextual introduction about the man himself. In this sense, Michael McCaughan's work in uncovering the background and contextual life and times of Walsh the writer proves so useful. Regretably, there is nothing here in the introduction or accompanying essays that reveal anything new about Marcos or his writing. So even the most basic questions - like why this masked guerrilla, carrying his submachine gun, spends all his time writing, - are not considered. The editor Ponce de Leon allows Marcos writings to stand alone. And this, in one sense, is fine - Ponce de Leon's work of gathering the body of the work, translating and footnoting, is a huge contribution in itself - but I can't help thinking its a great opportunity lost.

So if you are interested in a critique of Marcos or his writing, forget it with this collection. The editor´s introduction Travelling Back for Tomorrow, is premised in the usual fawning adoration, contributing to the Marcos myth and legend, one that urgently needs to be debunked before his myth becomes his own, and the Zapatista's undoing. We need to see Marcos as a real man, foibles and all - an extraordinary figure, a great military strategist, a brilliant writer, but a human, filled with the usual inconsistencies and desperate failings. Despite these editorial shortcomings, what we do have in this anthology is enough to make any activist tingle with joy.
Marcos´ writing is beautiful and expansive enough to fit every revolutionary tradition. His great ruse is to make each tradition think of him as representing them - the indigenous say he is one of them, the guerrillas claim him as one of their own, the intellectuals include him in their pantheon, Mexican nationalists see him as a great Mexican nationalist, NGOs see him as an advocate for NGO´s, Marxists see him as one of their sect, anarchists claim him as part of their tradition, even the base church sees him as an advocate of their prefential option of the poor. This potentially complex multiple personality disorder is of course symbolized by the ever-present mask. Would the real Sub Marcos please stand up?! In this collection we find Marcos the military tactician, the politician, the (anti-) statesman, the storyteller, the wise old sage, the wit, the clown, the poet, the philosopher, the....it just doesn't stop. He can engage a 5 -year-old child as much as the President of the Republic, as much as the great literary minds of the age, as much as the peasant farmer. Is he superhuman?! Here´s the good news. A good proportion of his writing, as demonstrated in this anthology, is dirge. He is refreshingly flawed, and human. Here in this anthology you can read some real fucking gibberish. And here´s the better news - the good stuff - which I would rate as about half this anthology, 50 or so of the pieces - are singularily brilliant, scathing, witty, fantastic; the most inspired radical writings of the end of the 20th century.

The anthology is appropriately called The Word is our Weapon. Strange guerrillas are they, what with their complete lack of appetite to engage in armed struggle. Not since the first week of 1994 have the Zapatistas engaged the enemy militarily (foot-note 3) and this is their strength (but may also be their undoing). Learning from the hopeless carnage of the Dirty War against the popular forces in the 70´s, Marcos steers the EZLN away from military confrontation with the Mexican Army and towards political confrontation with the State dictatorship. Marcos is an attentive student of revolutionary history. "The flower of the word will not die," he declares in one of the most prosaic and powerful works, the Fourth Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle, (Jan 1996) (Ponce de Leon, p. 86).
"Our words, our song and our cry, is so that the most dead will no longer die. We fight that they may live. We sing so they might live. The word lives....The word becomes a soldier so as not to die in oblivion...."
One could imagine Walsh turning over in his undisclosed grave, with pleasure. Marcos and the Zapatistas represent all the dead freedom fighters´ phoenix rising. Marcos takes the essential elements of the guerrilla fighter - armed resistance and the will of the people, and, like Walsh argued, expands the arsenal. "We use the weapon of resistance, ....the arm of the word, the weapon of our culture, the weapon of music, the weapon of dance...." Marcos (p. 161). Ultimately Marcos articulates the great historical paradox of the guerrilla fighters - "....we became soldiers so that one day soldiers would no longer be necessary." (p. 161). A philosophical tenet that perhaps was overlooked by legions of dead freedom fighters who, like the Montoneros, fought, not wisely, but too well. Power flows from the barrel of a gun, says Mao, but what if the guerrilla fighters don't fight for power, but for the deconstruction of power? Autonomy seems a wholley different project, demanding a completely new formulation of tactics and strategy. The Zapatistas back the word with mass mobilisations, popular plebisites, road show caravans, popular expressions of support and most significantly, building concrete autonomous municipalities.

The Freedom Fighter as .... Freedom Fighter.

But what does a reading of these two books together do to contribute towards developing an anti-authoritarian perspective? First of all, since many of our milieu think the sun shines out of Marcos arse, or his pen, it is useful to understand that he came, ideologically and practically, from the Latin America armed, authoritarian left. McCaughan´s True Crimes plots some crucial years and struggles of the tumulteous times of the armed authoritarian left, a cycle that began with the Cuban revolution and ended with the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas in 1990. (Marcos also spent time in Nicaragua in the 1980´s). Rebels of conscience like Walsh who fought not for power but for justice, realised, albeit too late, the follies of the authoritarian resistance organisation. Marcos´ political acumen lies in subsuming the authority of the authoritarian guerrilla EZLN in the horizontal organisation of the indigenous clandestine assembly. So clearly it is important to know our history well and the background of the movements we covet (or not). Our beloved Zapatistas might not fit in to an anti-authoritarian paradigm as much as we might perceive ; revolutionaries (like Walsh) from armed movements like the Montoneros are not necessarily macho authoritarians.

Secondly, I think a reading of these two books together can be useful in allowing us to to think tactically and strategically. Both Walsh and Marcos are intellectual tacticians who respond to the political situation they are confronting. Obviously neither are constrained by moral dilemnas over the use of physical force, but nor are they warlords. Walsh recognised the catastrophic consequences of all out military confrontation with the enemy and Marcos learn this lesson well. After a week of battle, the Zapatistas changed strategic direction and pursued a political offensive deploying the word as their weapon. But power has been trying to lure them for years into the constitutional political spectrum. The Zapatistas plainly understand that their arms, or the threat of arms, is their crucial negotiating tool. The word is a weapon deployed in the shadow of the gun. Most of all we learn from these books the necessity to take the word and employ it in the service of revolutionary struggle. Writing thesis or books is ok. Journalism and video-making is fine. Teaching and social work is useful. Raising awareness and funds for international solidarity is important. But from Walsh and Marcos we learn we must have the courage to go the whole way, to write and fight, to back our fine intellectual endevours with concrete organising and action. Destroy the ivory towers and get down in the streets and fields of revolutionary struggle where real change is possible. The word as a weapon is not enough. Intellectual activity unconnected with grass-roots struggle is mute. Conversly, from Walsh´s story, its clear ultra-militancy is a fools game. Before his premature death, Walsh was navigating a critical territory away from the authoritarian left towards a new formulation. This was a path was crossed a decade later by Marcos, from the FLN to the EZLN.

The EZLN are a new paradigm, a renewel of revolutionary struggle ; the path unfolds before us. Walking we learn.

Days of Boredom, Nights of Torture

2006-09-02T14:29:00.000-07:00

One more push nihilists, if you want to be revolutionaries.
Perspectives on Anarchist Theory
Reviewing:Days of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc for Beginners (CrimethInc Workers’ Collective, 2001) and Days and Nights of Love and War by Eduardo Galeano (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1983).

A STORMY NIGHT….

The wild Pacific Ocean pounds the shore of the tiny Guatemalan port town of Champerico. Overrun by gangs and drugs, Champerico gets one line in the guidebook: sweltering, dilapidated, dangerous—best avoided. My kinda town. Here, among the ghosts of Guatemala’s terrible recent history and the tumultuous daily life of a lawless, desperado town as far removed from shopping mall America as can be imagined, is a good location to begin considering the two books in question.

Galeano’s book is a journal and historical memory of two decades of struggle and perseverance in Latin America, revolving around the pivotal moment of the military coup in Argentina in 1976. CrimethInc’s book is a “cosmology” of radical criticism of contemporary US (and Western European) society that articulates a position of total rebellion toward everyday life. “Are there ways of thinking, acting, and living that may be more satisfying and exciting than the ways we think, act, and live today?”1 is the question they pose by way of introducing their provocative tract. While Galeano’s book emerges from the New Left, 1968 revolutionary wave, and CrimethInc from the anarchist resurgence of the 1990s, they are linked by their cut and paste aphoristic style, and filled with vignettes, tales and nuggets of revolutionary or radical wisdom. Both embrace philosophy and morality as weapons within a political superstructure.

Champerico evokes the spirit of both books. The fear and terror described in Galeano’s book lingers interminably everywhere in a Guatemala struggling to deal with the aftermath of 30 years of brutal internecine war. And in terms of CrimethInc, here is a place off the global map, a dérive from the usual, a place full of adventures and stories where books could write themselves and one could, in the Situationist sense, take their dreams for reality and really live.

Days and nights of love and war indeed. Strolling along the beach at dusk one evening, I came upon a middle-aged couple in the midst of some appalling drunken melee. The man slapped the woman’s face, dramatically ripped off his clothes and stumbled into the turbulent sea in what appeared to be a quite pathetic attempt to drown himself. The woman screamed and turned to me, hapless bystander, pleading that I rescue the flailing man from the dangerous surf. Somewhat reluctantly, I entered the sea and dragged the inebriated fool to safety. We dragged the naked man by his heels up to a beachside bar; his head left a comical trail in the sand. The woman, who turned out to be the owner of the bar, was apoplectic with gratitude, and furnished me with endless sea food and rum and a bevy of tales about her eclectic life, while Mr Suicide slept off his disgrace.

I remembered the incident as I applied myself to writing this review. CrimethInc implore us to live our lives on the edge, to roam, to discover life by engaging the subterranean springs and discover in the immediate present the revolution of everyday life. In this sense, today’s little adventure—with its component parts of love, conflict, rescue, and resolution—was a moment of engaging life critically, a CrimethInc-esque situation of sorts. This from the section entitled “H is for History:” “If we dare to throw ourselves into the unknown and unpredictable, to continually seek out situations that force us to be in the present moment, we can break free of the feelings of inevitability and inertia that constrain our lives—and in those instants, step outside of history."2I didn’t feel myself lifted outside of history, but I understand what they are getting at.
But as a prescription for rebellion, is it enough to merely “shake off the dead weight of the past” and “place our selves and our present day existence where they rightfully belong, in the centre of our universe?"3

Here Galeano’s wisdom, born of real struggle, of real days and nights of love and war, is instructive: “Will we be capable of learning humility and patience? I am the world, but very small. A man’s time is not history’s time, although admittedly, we would like it to be."4

STEALING BEAUTY AS RECYCLED SHIT

Of course, it is unfair to compare CrimethInc’s rag-tag collection of plagiarized ideas with Galeano’s rich testimony to struggle and survival—but they brought it on themselves by inappropriately ripping off his title for their book.

Why do CrimethInc call their book Days of War and Nights of Love? There is no war and scant love (maybe a little teenage infatuation) in this tract. Instead there is boredom with the world they live in, and a quest for something else, an impatient desire to live in a completely different world. Galeano’s beautiful title, which captures well the theme and content of his work and evokes the fine poetic sensibility of his prose, is typically inappropriate for the CrimethInc book. They should have called it something like The ABC of CrimethInc (Anti-) Ideology, a more fitting title for such a pedestrian, navel-gazing tract as this.

The misrepresentation continues with the images adorning the covers—a masked Zapatista and a grenade—suggesting some kind of handbook of guerrilla insurgency. But CrimethInc for Beginners is no guerrilla manifesto. And Galeano’s book is full of tales of masked guerrillas with grenades, but this book is not a handbook of insurgency either. If anything, it is the opposite—a grim chronicle of the follies of armed struggle. Those who resist are not portrayed in the heroic mode, à la Che, but as very ordinary men and women, flawed and weighed down by their inevitable tragic destiny. He spends a few days with some guerrillas in Guatemala: “They were very young…the army was on their tail and they told dirty jokes and roared with laughter… We slept on the ground, hugging one another, bodies glued together for warmth and to keep the early morning freeze from killing us…. Are any of the boys I met back then in the mountains still alive?"5

Galeano talks about real life, real people, real situations, and the psycho-geography of the battlefield of war and love. In the end, it seems like almost all of Galeano’s friends, comrades, acquaintances, and lovers had been disappeared, tortured, exiled, or damaged beyond recognition. Galeano’s achievement is to rescue from this carnage a sense of the dignity and gentle humanity of those who fell, or those who somehow survived. See how he remembers Raúl Sendic, the legendary Tupamaros guerrilla commander—not as a deified heroic martyr, nor cloaked in the sublime mystic of a clandestine revolutionary, but as a kind, humble man: “I close my eyes and again see Raúl in front of the campfire, on the banks of the Río Uruguay. He lifts a live coal to my lips because, bungler that I am, I have let my corn husk cigarette go out again."6

CrimethInc employ the symbols of armed struggle—guns, bullets, grenades, petrol bombs—for no reason other than their spectacular effect, something like the way advertising appropriates sex to sell products: “This book is composed of ideas and images we’ve remorselessly stolen and adjusted for our purposes.…"7And what purpose would this be? German RAF urban guerrilla Ulrike Mienhof, murdered in Stanheimn prison, is portrayed with these incoherent words pasted over her image: “You will find your only safety is in danger—CrimethInc."8The mindless desecration of her memory to make a fatuous point reminds me of a joke. What do you get if you cross a situationist with a mafioso? A guy who makes you an offer you can’t understand. And what do you get if cross a CrimethIncer with a situationist? A bad photocopy of a good book.
Text, ideas, and graphics are borrowed and pilfered from the Stoke-Newington fanzine Vague, British graphic artist Clifford Harper, French situationist Raoul Vaneigem and indeed, the whole of the Situationist pantheon. They sack the archives of radical sub-culture to compound a falsehood, the basic premise of this book, that it is an instrument for “total liberation.” In reality, CrimethInc’s vision seldom rises above that of a suburban kid rebelling against authority. Mired in the punk rock and crusty sub-culture, the practical application of all this revolutionary theory is apparently realized by forming a band, fucking in a park, going vegan or—oh my God now we’re really fucking doing it!—giving out phony free tickets to the local cinema.9 It soon becomes clear that the real crime here is the way they plunder some of the finest and most invigorating ideas from the end of the 20th century, and render them dull and inchoate.

LOVE AND WAR IN THE BELLY OF THE BEAST

Possibly the most creative and probably the only original idea in CrimethInc’s book is a blurb on the back cover written by JD Salinger:“If Henry Miller had gone to fight with the anarchists in Spain while Orwell sought the caresses of beautiful women in France, and they had collaborated to write a manifesto on war and love, this is the sort of book they might have produced…” However I think that it is Galeano, not CrimethInc, who has produced that sort of book, and it is Days and Nights of Love and War.

Like Orwell, Galeano has taken up arms against fascism, in this case, the Argentinean dictatorship. As he flees for his life, he finds solace in exile in the arms of a variety of extraordinary women from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn. For obvious reasons he doesn’t spell out his direct involvement in the armed movements in Argentina and Uruguay, although he does write about a visit to a guerrilla camp in Guatemala and conversations with Cuban veterans in the Sierra Maestro. As he drinks fine wine on summer nights overlooking the River Plate, boozes in back street taverns, or barbecues in the countryside, all his cronies seem to be well known guerrillas on the run, clandestinos or comandantes with a tale or two to tell.
Galeano has been described as the finest Latin American non-fiction writer alive. He employs wonderful lyrical prose that mesmerized readers in his now legendary historical trilogy Memory of Fire with even greater passion here, for now he is chronicling the history not just of his continent, but of his own comrades, friends, family, and lovers. A scathing critique of the Latin American dictatorships is interspersed with intimate vignettes relating the struggle and pain of his compañeros and compañeras. In quiet moments of introspection, his mind moves on philosophical themes—love, death, commitment, betrayal, good wine. The book is a testimony to surviving pain and violence with a capacity for love and tenderness still intact10—a manifesto of hope despite the times, or dreams undiminished despite the sorrow.

Galeano is at once Orwell in the Spanish trenches facing fascist bullets, and Miller, if not cavorting in lascivious depravity with Parisian whores, at least reveling in the pleasure of nocturnal embraces. Although even here, the shadow of war haunts the joy of sex: “ ...Morning comes and the aroma announces tasty, steamy, freshly made coffee. Your face radiates a clean light and your body smells of love juices.... We count the hours that separate us from the night to come. Then we will make love, the sorrowcide."11

Salinger’s reference to Orwell and Miller in the CrimethInc blurb refers to Orwell’s famous essay, “Inside the Whale” (1940). Orwell reviews Miller’s work and is appalled that the American, although a radical, is concerned solely with the celebration of individual liberation. Miller, we learn, dismisses Orwell’s notion of going to fight fascism in Spain as “sheer stupidity...the act of an idiot."12Miller chooses the vagabond life of poverty and deprivation as a means of seeking personal salvation, cavorting in the streets and whorehouses of Paris in search of individual liberation while Europe burns. As the threat of Nazism and Fascism loomed over Europe, Miller had removed himself into the safety of the metaphorical belly of a whale, a comfortable space to escape from the storm outside. For Orwell, marching off to the trenches Spain from “a sense of obligation,” Miller’s stance is “the final unsurpassable stage of irresponsibility.” “He is fiddling while Rome is burning,” fumes Orwell, “and unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face towards the flames."13

While CrimethInc would probably consider themselves a mixture of Miller’s libertarianism and Orwell’s direct action, here they have written a book more akin to Miller’s escapism and individualistic nihilism. They too fiddle while Rome burns. There is no analysis of the macro-political situation; no capitalist globalization, or US hegemony, or imperialism. Even US domestic issues—social control, militarization, the war on drugs, and the prison system—don’t merit a mention. CrimethInc’s anarchism “as a personal approach to life” reflects Miller’s quietism and mysticism. Their quest for individual freedom in the form of squatting, shoplifting, jumping trains, and eating out of garbage cans could be considered a way of living off the belly of the beast, if not inside the whale. As tactics and strategy, these don’t get us very far toward the goal of “total liberation.”

Anticipating this criticism, a CrimethIncer writes: “we have limited ourselves for the most part here to criticism of the established order, because we trust you to do the rest. This book is supposed to help you analyze and disassemble this world—what you build for yourself in its place is in your hands, although we have offered some general ideas of where to start.…"14
And so what does CrimethInc offer?
“F is for Freedom… In the summer of 1999, CrimethInc special agent Tristan Tzarathustra...had eaten only garbage all year as a consequence of his oath not to participate in, add fuel to, or encourage in any way the economy of world capitalism..."15Oh dear. This guy would make a great naga sadhu, Hindu holy man, stand naked on one leg up a pole for 20 years, tow a freight train with his penis, that kind of thing. Tristan Tzarathustra, crusty holy man.
“H is for Hygiene.” The right to be dirty, etc. “Try violating a few of the ‘common sense’ rules of Western sanitation some time; you’ll find that eating out of garbage cans and going a few weeks without a shower aren’t really as dangerous or difficult as we were taught."16Try this for fun?! To make a statement? Or as an experiment to feel empathy with the downtrodden? Eating out of garbage cans is not the answer to any thing except spectacular depravity and in terms of CrimethInc’s general strategy, making feral love in a graveyard under the stars is no fun with really smelly people.
“S is for space.... Try exploring in your own neighborhood, looking on rooftops and around corners you never noticed before—you’ll be amazed how much adventure is hidden there waiting for you."17Endless days of war and nights of love awaiting all you intrepid neighborhood CrimethIncers out there! Don’t get caught!

Having disassembled the world, CrimethInc leaves the rebel outside the system, isolated and alone in personal revolt, further from the general population without the social formation or tools to start building collective projects or the ability to organize concretely. In plagiarizing the Situationist pantheon, they have ignored the most relevant part towards for really changing the world and aspiring towards “total liberation”: “Radical Criticism has merely analysed the Old World and its negation. It must now either realize itself in the practical activity of the revolutionary masses or betray itself by becoming a barrier to that activity."18DETOURNING ANARCHY"A is for Anarchy... You don’t want to be at the mercy of governments, bureaucracies, police, or other outside forces, do you? Surely you don’t let them dictate your entire life."19Surely? Firstly, this kind of self-righteous sermonizing sounds a lot better in its original French, and secondly, how can we be, like, anarchists, if you keep telling us how we should be, Reverend CrimethInc?

CrimethInc feel the need to resurrect anarchism “as a personal approach to life.” Here they are borrowing more than an idea, but a historical tendency that they are “adjusting for their own purposes.” “Anarchism is the revolutionary idea that no one is more qualified than you are to decide what your life will be."20There are many definitions of anarchism, but to reduce the definition to such a purely personal sense is to do it a grave injustice. Anarchism as a historical tendency, as a form of anti-authoritarian community or workers’ self-organization is a concept that CrimethInc throws out the window. Work is the problem for them, not how workers organize. (Maybe workers are the problem for these freewheeling non-workers.)

Movements too are a problem for CrimethInc. This from CrimethInc heavy-hitter Nadia C: “Total revolution will not come merely as a result of proper planning and hard work but out of a leap of faith.... Each of us must be faithful to the yearnings of her heart for things too extravagant to ever fit in this world, and pursue them to such lengths that others are inspired to their own pursuits. It is this alchemy we need, not another movement."21Apart from the quaint mysticism expressed here, the more perplexing thing is the idea that we don’t need to organize together, or struggle together. It’s enough that we inspire others to their own pursuits. CrimethInc challenge the truism that every anarchist is a socialist, but not every socialist is an anarchist. CrimethInc are not socialists and the question that remains is whether they are indeed anarchists, or merely libertines.

And then there is their irresolute class analysis, stuck in at the end of the C is for Capitalism section entitled “Post script: A Class War everyone can fit in."22The author argues that there is no class distinction before the misery of modern life, and that rich and poor share the same suffering: “It does not matter if a woman is buried alive in a prison, in a sweat-shop... in a prestigious university, or in a mansion with a private swimming pool, so long as she is buried alive.…"23This criminal assertion defies comment. The writer concludes: “So we must all, rich and poor, band together to transform our situation.…"24Is this something Bono said to Bill Gates at the recent World Economic Forum? H is for History and a long-standing problem of human history is that the rich have been unwilling to give up their wealth, privilege, or power to the poor. It is a situation that the rich, even if they are miserable in their mansions, have not been willing to change, which has given rise to class struggle. “A class war everyone can fit in” is OK if you remember that the rich and poor are on opposing sides.

Here I can’t use Galeano’s book as a stick with which to beat CrimethInc. Galeano is not an anarchist and I search Days and Nights of Love and War for some indication of his politics but none reveals itself, apart from the broadest possible anti-dictatorship, human rights agenda. This is a serious problem with the book. One of the reasons the state went into overdrive was the fact that the resistance was really threatening their power. The resistance, armed and widespread, in the form of the Argentinean Montoneros, the largest guerrilla army in Latin American, or the smaller Uruguayan Tupamaros, inspired by the Cuban Revolution and the Guevarista insurrectionary model, were capable of destabilizing the state and even aspired to seize power. Kid gloves were off, and all kinds of atrocities were tolerated in the name of the saving the “homeland” from communism. Galeano’s testimony, without spelling it out, indicates that armed struggle achieved nothing except getting everyone killed.

But this is not the lesson the book intends to teach. Indeed, Galeano offers no critique of the failures of the resistance movement, or of its tactics and strategy. He focuses solely on the carnage wrought by the dictatorship. This is understandable considering the massacres and atrocities perpetrated against anyone who didn’t support the regime, but a little dishonest. For example, he lists contributors to his magazine Crisis who were killed or disappeared.25 One is Rodolfo Walsh. Walsh was a well-known writer, but the probable reason the state assassinated him was that he was an officer in the Montoneros. A number of successful guerrilla operations have been attributed to Walsh, including the masterminding of a canteen bombing that killed 42 cops. Galeano excludes this part of the story, no doubt to protect his comrades, living and dead—but the book suffers from an incomplete account of the events. It shies away from examining the armed struggle and its consequences. We would be all the wiser if we were presented with the full picture.

CHAMPERICO REVISITED

Back by the Champerico sea, the plot thickened. I returned to breakfast “on the house,” and an offer from the gracious woman to come live with them. Mr Suicide appears, hung-over, and somewhat sheepishly apologizes for yesterday’s incident. As we share breakfast, the woman explains that her husband was formerly a colonel in the Guatemalan army. Now forced to live as a humble fisherman, nobody treats him with the respect he feels he deserves. She herself is from El Salvador, and I notice she is wearing a T-shirt supporting the Arena party—basically, the fascist death-squad party during Salvador’s long anti-insurgency war.
So must we really, as CrimethInc urge, “shake off the dead weight of the past”?

My spontaneous adventure on the Champerico sea front becomes complicated by the weight of contextual information. These people are not simply part of my rich engagement with the present moment, but people with heavy pasts, pasts that are intractably connected to the killing fields of these places, and suddenly I regret becoming involved. Maybe I should have let the fucking drunken Colonel drown.

Galeano again, this time a soliloquy on the state’s solution to eliminate resistance, that is as relevant to the Argentinean and Uruguayan situations in the 1970s as to Guatemala and El Salvador in the 1980s: “Extermination plan: destroy the grass, pull up every last living thing by the roots, sprinkle the earth with salt. To colonize consciences, suppress them; to suppress them, empty them of the past. Wipe out all testimony to the fact in this land there ever existed anything other than silence, jails, and tombs. It is forbidden to remember."26
The problem with CrimethInc is not their spirit of unfettered romanticism and irreverent passion—we can’t get enough of that—but the unbearable lightness and depthlessness of their philosophy and praxis.

In their haste to embrace wild abandon and “live as the subject rather than the object of history"27they beat their wings frantically like Icarus toward the sun, hopelessly flawed. Their wings of desire, born of a rich tapestry of radical Situationist and anarchist discourses, are employed inappropriately for their individualist and egotistical project.

POSTSCRIPT: PASSIONATE ACTS OF REFUSAL

At heart, CrimethInc’s Days of War and Nights of Love is a manifesto against complacency, passivity, and pessimism. They exhibit a great capacity to produce large amounts of high quality propaganda (including their free broadsheet Harbinger, and the popular Fighting For Our Lives pamphlet, with a reputed print run of 250,000 copies). One can’t begrudge their productivity, or their fervent desire to spread their plagiarized word, but to what end do they do it and for what purpose?

CrimethInc begins with the brand name, and ends with the relentless merchandizing of “radical” products on their website. In between there is, as exhibited by this book, an individualist, selfish, and inchoate rebel ideology that eschews work, political organizing, and class struggle. In a world at war and facing terminal crisis, CrimethInc’s transcendental philosophy and ahistorical lightness is a form of intellectual masturbation. Like rootless ex-pats unconnected to the daily life around them, CrimethInc’s lifestylism is a form of self-imposed exile within their own society. Without a base, without a movement to critique, they speak with a corpse in their mouth. It’s not enough to merely identify with the dispossessed; the task is to find common voice and organize with them. Without a relevant discourse on the daily life of the potentially insurrectionary multitudes of here and now, CrimethInc remain mere historical archivists, trainspotters of radical discourse, a superannuated hobby with no practical application. "Wherever passionate acts of refusal and a passionate consciousness of the necessity of resistance trigger stoppages in the factories of collective illusion, there the revolution of everyday life is underway".28
Vaneigem gave examples of this revolution underway: Watts, Prague, Stockholm, Stanleyville, Turin, Mieres, the Dominican Republic, Amsterdam, flash points in that era of violent insurrection, wildcat strike action, the resurgence of workers’ councils, and general self-management. Not the apolitical hedonism of individuals saying, “Fuck this, I’m hitting the road,” or “I’m going to make love in the park,” or “I’m forming a punk rock band.” CrimethInc don’t think collectively, just individually, and this forms the whole deceptive nature of the book. The work of revolutionary insurgency must be done by the revolutionary insurgents—that is, the workers and non-workers in mass revolt.

One more push nihilists, if you want to be revolutionaries.

ENDNOTES1) CrimethInc, Days of War, Nights of Love: CrimethInc for Beginners (CrimethInc Workers’ Collective, 2001), 8.2) CrimethInc, Days of War, Nights of Love, 113.3) Ibid., 114.4) Eduardo Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 172.5) Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, 23.6) Ibid., 43.7) CrimethInc, Days of War, Nights of Love, 11.8) Ibid., 259.9) Ibid., 193.10) Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, 42.11) Ibid., 175.12) George Orwell, “Inside the Whale,” http://www.orwell.ru/library/essays/whale/.13) Ibid.14) Crimethinc, Days of War, Nights of Love, 11.15) Ibid., 103.16) Ibid., 125.17) Ibid., 210.18) Raoul Vaneigem, “Postcript: A toast to revolutionary workers” in The Revolution of Everyday Life (London: Rebel Press, 2003), 275.19) CrimethInc, Days of War, Nights of Love, 35.20) Ibid., 41.21) Ibid., 172.22) Ibid., 81.23) Ibid., 81.24) Ibid., 81.25) Galeano, Days and Nights of Love and War, 174.26) Ibid., 178.27) CrimethInc, Days of War, Nights of Love, 14.28) Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, 271.

Review in LEFT TURN / Horde Story

2006-08-10T08:15:00.000-07:00

"A very funny map of a committed life and a guide for whom writing is “a joy, not a chore.”"
Reviewed by Juliana Fredman
Summer 2006 Edition
Left turn _________________________

Clandestines is a collection of short stories operating as a psychogeography of social and revolutionary movements from the late 1980’s on, mapped by a radicalized Irish anti-authoritarian. Moving from the Old to the New World the stories track the convulsions of the global system and its revolutionary undercurrents through the experience of our erstwhile story-teller. His astute observations embellish reporting, advocacy and tall tales of unpredictable characters and communities to construct an optimistic, if quixotic take on these end times. At its heart it is a testament to hope for the world vibrantly illustrated by handrawn maps and black and white photographs.

The first section of the book details radical movements in Europe. The initial stories take place in the squatted communities of Berlin during the twilight of the Cold war. It is full of vivid descriptions of anarchists hopping eastward over the Berlin wall to escape the western riot police “welcomed by East German border guards with tea and biscuits” when not battling the bullen on Mayday. Back in the squat 20 hour sessions of ideological gymnastics necessary to organize anything will get a belly laugh from anyone familiar with consensus decision making. Many of the stories are hilarious and more useful for it. A young voice, enraptured with enticements of life and hopeless love among the barricades evokes a lost space that became more about lifestyle than in-depth political struggle. Still, because we are watching through the eyes of a teenage rebel engrossed in the business of actually creating another world this eulogy to the heroic phase of the Autonomes and the European squat scene registers powerfully just how much the terrain of youth culture and street politics has shifted since the end of the cold war.

At a rainbow gathering in Croatia we travel with an older, worldlier protagonist, looking for a bit of R&R after the G8 mobilization in Genoa. He balks at the apolitical nature of the participants, plotting his smart comeback if, “another naked yuppie computer programmer from Munich calls me ‘brother’” and lamenting the evolving plans of the tribe to impose their next gathering on the “unsuspecting” residents of the Brazilian Amazon. The story grapples with how lifestyle too often replaces politics and creates reactionary simulacrum of radical space. We have seen the `counterculture’ of the 1960’s repeatedly conflated by the mainstream media and baby boomer pundits with the real social and political movements of that era. There is a cautionary note here surrounded by a story of boredom and nudity in the wilderness, “one more push, idealists, if you want to be revolutionaries.”

Indeed, this thread runs throughout the collection. There is a common understanding by the narrator of his own romantic proclivities, which simultaneously inspire and hamper him. Working on a banana boat criss-crossing between Europe and Central America, he imparts enthusiastic histories of the reign of pirates in early capitalism. However his Filipino and Chinese workmates are often underwhelmed by his musings on Atlantic proletarian life.

“There is no mystery to the sea, it is simply the ocean and we are a metal box floating on top of it. And it is dangerous, stupid even. We are all fools, and we do it only because we have to”

It is in the New World, the final section that the movement, embodied in this experience by the Zapatista’s radical autonomous organization reaches a zenith and where our interlocutor has lived for the last decade. These narratives engage with issues that preoccupy activists globally. At the Third Encuentro in Brazil the confrontation between proponents of horizontal organizing and participatory democracy and those who would have reform within existing hierarchies, is animated for the reader. However, some of the best stories in this section are told during seemingly interminable, bumpy trips through Central America. Tales From a Vanquished Pier is a fantastic yarn that slides easily into hilarious absurdity. The Chicken Bus Diaries offers a sober view of changes wrought in the years between the twilight of Sandinismo, when our pirate was a bright eyed young solidarity activist, and the new millennium, by which time the neoliberal counterrevolution had taken its pound of flesh and created a pressing need for new tactics.

Western activism has spawned numerous academics, a cadre of journalists and a million filmmakers, yet we are sparse in the tradition of storytellers, bards. There is not a contemporary literary tradition among those engaged in struggle, as there is in the global south. Clandestines perches between these. In the more edifying passages the desires of the participant narrator to instruct can undermine the integrity of the stories. But most of the time we have a very funny map of a committed life and a guide for whom writing is “a joy, not a chore.”

Review - Wooden Shoe.

"In the great tradition of Irish Sory-tellers, Ryan brings a whole new idea to International Solidarity..."
Book: Clandestines: the Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile by Ramor Ryan
Review by: James Generic Posted: 8.24.2006
At first I thought it was going to be an over-romantic story of this guy travelling around the world in order to avoid himself, in the way that a lot of Crimethinc type of stuff reads. I'm really not into that kind of stuff. However, he really surprised me, and I'm ashamed I thought that of him in the first place in association with Crimethinc, because this guy is a real character, a great writer, and no one can call him fake for leaving out the messy details. In fact, read about his review of the two different "Days of War and Nights of Love" (one by Crimethinc, and one by Eduardo Galeano) online.

In the great tradition of Irish story-tellers, Ryan recalls experiences from the squats of West Berlin, the war zone of Kurdistan, the revolution and post-revolution repression in Nicauragua, his youth in Ireland watching the British army attack a Republican demonstration, and much more. He is an exile from his native land, moving from situations of struggle across the planet with a keen analysis of each. Ryan left Ireland in the 1980s for Nicaragua to help defend the Revolution there, and ended up seeing the Sandinistas crumble under the might of the US-funded Contras, alienating Indigenous peoples struggling for autonomy in the process. He remarks that a generation of international solidarity activists in the 1980s got their start in Nicaragua; much like many saw the same in Chiapas in the 1990s.
If you've never heard of Ramor Ryan, look him up. I would love to meet him, because this guy has such a wealth of information and has seen so much without thinking he is better than anyone else for having done so. He brings a personal touch to bloody places stormed by revolution, repression, and fights for a better world. By the end of it, I thought to myself that he had really lived his life thus far to the fullest, and brought a whole new meaning to what I thought of as an "international solidarity" activist. Much of what he writes is exciting in that revolutionary situations are very much within reach, but at the same time depressing when he discusses the aftermath in the case of defeat (like in Kurdistan or in Nicaragua).

If you want to find an inspirational person, you have to meet Ramor Ryan by reading his Clandestines.

On the road with an Irish pirate
international | anarchist movement | review Saturday December 09, 2006 18:19 by Ciaran Murray
Clandestines, The Diary of an Irish Pirate Exile by Ramor Ryan AK Press €13.45 / £9.00
While it can be hard to come across political documents that inspire, entertain and amuse, Ramor Ryan‘s Clandestines succeeds in doing just that. Some may know Ryan from his articles in “We Are Everywhere” and “Confronting Capitalism” but Clandestines is his first published book. It is, for the main part, a travel diary and a readable mixture of personal memoir and political essay written over his many years as an anarchist activist. The book covers his journeys to a broad gamut of societies in struggle, from Berlin to Northern Ireland, Nicaragua to Turkey and many places in between.

The book is full of true, fantastic and at times audacious tales seen through the eyes of an Irish anarchist who is experiencing an irreversibly changing world first hand. The world Ramor traverses sees the collapse of “communism” in Eastern Europe, a growing sense of revolution in South America and the birth of a modern anti-globalisation movement. While at all times political yet personal, Ramor frequently forays into his relationships with activists, friends and strangers he picks up along the way, each who provide the reader with their personal affections and experiences.

What follows is something that reads like a modern hybrid of Behan’s Borstal Boy and the Canterbury Tales, with Ramor compiling the characters’ stories as he goes along, and using them to meaningful, insightful, and, at times, touching effect.

While the book could have fallen into an unintelligible journal of wholly separated and abstract events, Ryan brings events and people together and finds a common theme, of the shaping of these characters from the historic and social pressures of a rapidly changing world.

From the Kurdish guerrillas, to the Sandinistas, to the female bartender he meets in Cuba, Ramor documents people and communities coming to terms with a new, neo-liberal, world order. In Berlin, he experiences the life of a radical squatter and the regular running battles with local police associated with it. In Northern Ireland, he encounters the massacre of mourners at a republican funeral, and a community drawn together to cope with a violent and sectarian society.
In Turkey, he finds the volunteers of the PKK in training, young men and women willing to give up their lives for their idea of a Marxist revolution, and a feeling that if the world wasn’t ready for revolution they, at least, were. In South America he watched the Sandanistas take power in Nicaragua, while the FMLN were on the brink of overthrowing the government in El Salvador and the radical movements in Guatemala and Honduras gained ground.

Whether read as a travelogue, political document or collection of nostalgic memoirs, “Clandestines,” is a book that anyone with an interest in late 20th Century politics will understand, and enjoy.

Horde Story
I never came down
Dublin 1988

The old Foggy Dew was stuffed as usual, and it was hard to get served coz the two old-lad barmen were wrecked, too drunk to pump. A couple of the punters - punks with lurid red mohawks - leaned over the taps and served themselves, an act that took some nerve because the old lads were drunk but not stupid, and prone to outbursts of ultra violence.

Discussion around our table turned to the recent Golden Horde gig at the Baggot Inn where Simon, with characteristic unruliness, had lept in to the heaving mosh pit fists-flying to sort out some perceived wrongdoing. The Red Action lads were having none of it, and Simon disappeared under a barrage of punches. Des downed his guitar and dived into the melee to dig Simon back out. A typical Horde gig - never a dull moment.
Since we were all merrily squashed on top of one another into one of the Foggy Dew's smelly coves - friends and strangers alike - our neighbour joined in the conversation uninvited.
"Mongolians?" she asked.
"Mongolians?"
Yeah, Mongolians, Kazakhstan, the Golden Horde. Thirteenth century?"
"Eh, No, rock n roll band, Dubliners, 1988."
Turns out this knowledgeable girl had just returned from the disintegrating USSR – hence her exotic frame of reference. She must have been gone a long time coz she had never heard of the non-Mongolian Golden Horde.
"You gotta go see them," I said, "they are fucking magic."
"Grand," she said, "where they playing?"
Every Golden Horde fan knows where the next gig is going to be.
"Actually they are playing Kenmare tomorrow night, some festival..."
" Kerry? Great, lets go!"
Yeah, hey hey lets go. Very Horde. I liked this plucky sprite fresh from the USSR. She said her name was Aurnia and hailed from Dolphin's Barn . We supped up our pints of Guinness and left in search of adventure at closing time. But there was nowhere to go after closing time in Dublin that era. We tried the late night winery Blazes but it was full. Doesn't matter, we need to get up early for the hitch to Kerry tomorrow. Getting into the swing of things, I pulled out a can of spray paint and write Love the Horde in gold on a wall in Thomas Street. Then we retire to her little bedsit above a butchers in the Coombe.

Hitching to Kerry is always a long trawl - worse when you're hung over and it's started to rain interminably. At a deserted crossroads somewhere around Waterford we almost give up and go back to Dublin. "We'll never get there. Its taking all day". Indeed it was, and cars were few and far between on this forlorn road in the middle of nowhere.
"Look," said Aurnia, ever the pragmatist. "You hide in the bushes, and a car will stop for me, a girl alone, then you can jump out and join me in the car, right?"
Right, great plan. Although not every car would stop for this punky girl with her bleached blond hair, stripey jumper and doc martins. She smiled prettily, and sure enough, a Hyatt van pulled over. Success! The side door was swung open and Aurnia beckoned me from the bushes. I jumped out and ran to the van, following her into the back.
Inside of the back of the dark windowless van, we were received by half a dozen lads brandishing a variety of hammers, pick handles and machetes. One particularly unpleasant looking character smiled at us with missing teeth and an axe in his hands.
"How'yas lads!" said Aurnia cheerfully.
Turns out they were a gang on their way to the next village for a scrap with the locals there.
"Will you join us?" they guffawed menacingly. I was hoping that that invitation meant that we wouldn't become their aperitif before their gristly main event. Fortunately Aurnia's fearless charm assuaged the boys more atavistic tendencies and we emerged from that bloodcurdling Hyatt van at the next crossroads shook up but unscathed.
Somewhat remarkably we finally got to Kenmare late that night still in high spirits. Our enthusiasm untempered by the arduous 10 hours on the road, we rushed over to the hotel where the gig was going on. It would all be worthwhile, once we were jumping around in the mosh pit while Rorschach blasted.
But the doors were closed. 'Full' announced a sign on the glass entrance door.
"Fuck it, fuck it."
As luck would have it, that very moment we spotted Des walking by the door guitar in hand, on his way to stage. We pounded the glass and screamed his name. A flicker of recognition crossed his face – I had been to about 50 Horde gigs for fuck sake, so well it should. The door opened, we explained our plight - how our spontaneous joy at the thought of seeing the Horde in Kerry had catapulted us onto the road and brought us here after an epic trawl and could he please get us in...
Des obliged with ubiquitous plumass and we found ourselves at stage front as Simon grabbed the stage mic and began with his usual drawl - "We're the Golden Horde and we come from Dublin. Are you ready to rock and roll?.." and a guitar mish-mash plunged us into the opening song Paula and complete bedlam at the stage front.
As Golden Horde gigs went, it rocked. Although I missed the usual sea of familiar faces in the mosh pit of the Horde Dublin contingent, the Kerry locals clearly knew how to have a good time and everyone went bonkers, jumping about. In the spirit of unbounded bon homie, anyone who fell onto the floor was dragged back up by legions of comradely arms. Unlike some of the more notoriously macho mosh pits, the Horde pit was girl friendly and here in Kerry, the girls and boys swung around in each others arms, crushed together, delirious, ecstatic and enchanted. Waves of frenetic guitar-fueled psychosis washed over us, and time stood still as the mosh pit became the whole of the universe. " Are you enjoying yourselves?" screamed Simon in his Joey Ramone drawl, more like a command than a question. "We're gonna play a song for you and its called...Everything Under the Sun," and like a ballistic missile off went the band and its alter-ego the mosh pit once more...
As the night stretched out and the Horde thumped out one of their notoriously long sets, it was clear the management wanted everyone to go home, and not smash up their premises in some crazed Horde inspired delirium. The band went out with a bang, playing 100 Boys and Sammy flung his guitar away like some rapturous lovesick lenashee.
A strange silence enveloped us. We stood there blinking and disbelieving that it could possibly be all over, a mob of sweat-dripping and delighted zealots wishing that the music and the mosh pit would go on forever and life could always be so.

Aurnia and I decided to go backstage to thank Des for getting us in, but the dressing room was manic and we couldn't get near him. it was like a little bit of CBGB's in the heroic years had descended upon this tiny little Kerry town - An Neidín in Irish.
"We should at least buy him a pint," said Aurnia, but of course between us we didn't have enough for a pint at hotel prices.

The night was cool and it had begun to rain gently. Past midnight, the little town square was in rabid uproar, with throngs of drunks heaving around and a bunch of lads whacking each other other with 6-foot long poles. In our spur of the moment dash for the road leaving Dublin that morning we had typically forgotten some essentials – like money for a hostel, or at least a sleeping bag. Never mind, high on life after the glorious Horde gig, nothing affected us and sure enough – as things always go in situations like this - everything worked out splendidly.
As we stood on the side of the road wondering where we would kip down, a tourist bus pulled up in front of us and the tourists descended, heading on-masse into their posh hotel. We mingled with the group and once inside the hotel lobby, slipped up the stairs unnoticed. On the second floor we found ourselves a deserted and warm television room, like a stowaway's paradise. Lights out, Aurnia and I - thrilled with ourselves - rolled about on the lush carpet in romantic abandon , and despite the furnace of passion, there was a tactic understanding between us that everything was connected and part of the great mysterious magic that was the Golden Horde. Love the Horde!

The sun shone the next day and we stood quite glorious on the side of the road confident that we would have a fine journey back to Dublin. "Let's ask the Horde for a lift," suggested Aurnia, but I was against the idea. Once after a Horde gig in some dingy and scary Loyalist bar in Belfast me and Angus asked the Horde for a lift home in their bus. Des - the nice one - said yes (of course), while Simon - the nasty one - said no. " We don't want no young punks puking up all over our tour bus" he snarled. But Des's kindness won out in the end and feeling honoured we climbed aboard the sacred inner sanctum of the Golden Horde. Sure enough Angus puked up all over the back seat of the bus, and Simon growled at us and then Des, somewhat righteously.

Aurnia, newly initiated into the mystical, incandescent church of the Golden Horde, was really getting in to it.
"Wheres the next gig?"
Rotterdam, I said.
"Lets go!" she enthused. "And from there we can head across Europe towards the Urals, like Golden Hordish viziers of old, in search of our Mongolian Xanadu!"
Aurnia was swinging dangerously out of control. I recognized this condition - the imperceivable but devastating Golden Horde incubus penetrating ones' inner being, introducing lascivious wantonness into the psyche like a hypnotic analgesic opiate. And once inducted, the world would never be the same again.

I tell you this : a whole sub-generation of Irish kids never came down. '''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''

Review: Journey to the Ends of Anarchy (New York Indypendent)

2006-08-10T08:08:00.001-07:00

7/10 Anarchist Story Teller Searches for a Better World--Finds Pain, Despair, Lingering Hope
By John Tarleton
Indypendent

From the squats of Berlin to life as a deckhand on a Central American banana boat to the perilous mountains of rebel Kurdistan to an exhausted, mud-soaked slice of Zapatista utopia, Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile is a rollicking travelogue. Ryan knows the traveler’s secret of being open to the moment and trusting whatever it brings. His poignant tales of defeat, desolation, betrayal and lingering hope are told with both humor and a canny insight into the human spirit.

Keywords: Analysis, Local, Culture, Activism,
Clandestines: The Pirate Journals Of An Irish Exile
By Ramor Ryan
AK Press (2006)

When traveling activist Ramor Ryan started working on his new book, he envisioned writing a political tract comparing the demise of traditional top-down leftist politics with the subsequent rise around the world of a new generation of decentralized, grassroots social movements that seek to transform power more than to seize it. Fortunately, Ryan ended up doing something entirely different: telling stories.

From the squats of Berlin to life as a deckhand on a Central American banana boat to the perilous mountains of rebel Kurdistan to an exhausted, mud-soaked slice of Zapatista utopia, Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile is a rollicking travelogue. Ryan knows the traveler’s secret of being open to the moment and trusting whatever it brings. His poignant tales of defeat, desolation, betrayal and lingering hope are told with both humor and a canny insight into the human spirit.

Many of these tales end with bizarre twists – like the dictatorial banana boat captain who unexpectedly offers some absurd advice on the secret of happiness – that linger on in one’s mind. His then (1989-90) and now (2005) memories of Central America also give his larger narrative a painful twist as he returns to find societies that had once seemed on the verge of revolutionary transformation wrecked by war, neo-liberalism and the drug trade.

“This is a catastrophic region,” He writes. “Darkly violent places survive tenuously on remittances sent back from migrant family members working illegally in the U.S. and other countries. Nicaragua, the flagship of the failed revolutionary project, is like an orphaned child fallen in with a bad gang of glue-sniffing street kids.”

However, the least overtly political chapter in the book is perhaps the best written as he tells the story of a dismal Guatemalan port town and a group of lovesick housewives who cling to fading hopes that someday their immigrant husbands will bring them to the United States.

Beneath the artful storytelling, the author probes the Big Question that bedevils radicals of all stripes at this juncture in history: how do you transform a fundamentally flawed system that seems impervious to change? His witness to the cooptation and/or defeat of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Sandinistas, the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) and the Brazilian Workers Party is sobering and leaves one longing for a new approach.

While Ryan wears his anarchist politics on his sleeve, the book never descends into a screed. If anything, he is overly vague about his politics. What is anarchism – a defiant posture toward an unjust world? An attempt to work freely and cooperatively with others? An archipelago of politicized sub-cultures scattered on the margins of the global shopping mall? How can such an amorphous movement pose a serious challenge to business as usual? None of this is made clear. If you’ve spent time in “free, rebel spaces,” you will know.

The most inspiring example Ryan can point to is the Zapatistas autonomous municipalities in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas. Unfortunately, this chapter, Diez de Abril, is only 12 pages long and it doesn’t explore whether the mutual aid that has flowered in Zapatista communities is due at least in part to their circumstances – isolated, impoverished, land-based communities in which neighbors must work together to survive – and not so easily replicated in modern, consumer societies where activists as much as anyone else tend to lead highly atomized existences.

Despite Clandestines’ limitations, the book is a delightful read. Hopefully, Ryan hasn’t used up his stock of entertaining stories.

Review: San Francisco Bay Guardian : A Tribute to Resistance

2006-08-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

"A rousing, insightful, humorous tapestry of cultural resistance, Clandestines impels us to fear inaction, not failure, for mistakes are made to be learned from, and our lives are our own..."

San Francisco Bay Guardian
CLANDESTINES: THE PIRATE JOURNALS OF AN IRISH EXILE
By Ramor Ryan
AK Press
160 pages
$15.95 paper

"The rebel must return to their own past with a knife in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other," writes Ramor Ryan in Clandestines: The Pirate Journals of an Irish Exile. For nearly two decades, Ryan has been a political traveler, crossing the globe as both a keen observer and an earnest participant in many of the world's resistance movements. From Turkish Kurdistan to Sandinistan Nicaragua to East Berlin, he has kept one eye on the lookout for the powers that be and the other on history, contextualizing the adventures of the present by examining the lessons of the past in a manner both critical and celebratory.

Ryan's exhilarating and inspiring tales reveal the intersections of globalized politics' grand narratives and everyday life. The people he meets welcome him into their lives, into crowded Havana tenements and seedy Guatemalan port-town bars, as he searches for the spirit of struggle that underlies survival. "We look about us, our own lives, and we begin to resist where we are," he writes.

Clandestines is a tribute to resistance, which in his view, in the 21st century, is best enacted not in the trenches but in carved-out autonomous spaces — spaces of clandestinity. After examining failed revolutionary struggles in a world with one superpower, Ryan concludes that rather than battling power on its own terms, we must create our own alternatives. "Clandestinity is about protecting ourselves, our rebel spaces, and allowing the seed to germinate underground," he writes, taking us into German squats, Zapatista villages, and Sandinista coffee co-ops. But not just any autonomy will do — it must be engaged, not escapist, as is evident from his condemnation of a naively hedonistic Rainbow Gathering he attends in Croatia.

A rousing, insightful, humorous tapestry of cultural resistance, Clandestines impels us to fear inaction, not failure, for mistakes are made to be learned from, and our lives are our own. (Hunter Jackson)...

The book, from AKPress.com

2006-04-29T16:16:00.000-07:00

Ramor Ryan's pirate journals read like Che's Motorcycle Diaries infused with Hunter S. Thompson's wit and flair for the impossible. A shrewd political thinker and philosopher, with a knack for ingratiating himself into the thick of precarious situations, Ryan has been there and lived to tell about it.

As much an adventure story as an unofficial chronicle of modern global resistance movements, Clandestines spirits the reader into subterranean locales, carefully weaving the narrative through illicit encounters and public bacchanals. From the teeming squats of Berlin, to intrigue in the Zapatista Autonomous Zone, a Croatian Rainbow Gathering on the heels of the G8 protests in Genoa, mutiny on the high seas, the Quixotic ambitions of a Kurdish guerilla camp, the contradictions of Cuba, and the neo-liberal nightmare of post-war(s) Central America we see everywhere a world in flux, struggling to be reborn.

"At once celebratory and self-critical, Clandestines offers a geography lesson of the shadows, where borders are disregarded, revolution is in the air, and adventure is always just around the corner."—Jennifer Whitney, co-author of We Are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism

"I'm convinced that all we need is about a hundred more Ramors and the revolution would commence tomorrow."—David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology