not the motorcycle diaries

Did somebody hear something? It was coming from the Opposition frontbench.

Before anyone thinks about heeding this call for John Howard style intervention, watch this.

It was reported in Brazil this week that 6 people have been given prison sentences over the killing of MST and Via Campesina activist Valmir Mota de Oliveira, on an acampamento in Paraná on October 21st, less than three months ago. It is well known by now that Oliveira was shot by an armed ’security guard’ from NF Security, contracted by GM seeds multinational Sygenta*, and other ‘guards’ critically injured a number of other MST and VC militantes. According to Folha de São Paulo, Fabio Fereira, from NF, was also killed (this was new to me - there is no account of this in either the Via Campesina or MST reports). Celso Barbosa, an MST militante, has been charged with his murder and therefore makes up one of the sentenced, along with comrade Célia Lourenço.

Like MAS (although there are different interests and histories involved - not least that the MST is primarily a non-indigenous movement), 500 years of feral colonial power weighs on the MST’s efforts to secure land and, for that matter, land that flourishes organically and provides for all who live and work on it (MST settlements, in my brief experience, really do live up to that idea in many ways).

I’m thinking a lot on how the climax of killing and maiming allows those who have this weight behind them to claim that they are trapped beneath it. How this preposterous imbalance seems unable to avoid creating a world divided into victims and perpetrators, especially when it is a matter of taking life to save your own, which I imagine to be Barbosa’s (completely plausible) argument. And how the discourse of nonviolence can repeat this division by designating ‘violent’ and ‘nonviolent’ movements, events and people.

*Syngenta has an office in Australia of course, located here:
Level 1, 2-4 Lyon Park Road North Ryde NSW 2113, Australia

My three weeks in Bolivia ended up being a formative exercise in deconstructing the official news media, or what realpolitik might mean, or how to write (and not write) killing in a way that mourns every death; knowing how some murders are valued, contested, registered more than others, that mourning is intertwined with justice. 

When I arrived in La Paz, The News told me that there was fighting in the streets of Sucre where the constitutional assembly was meeting.  The government moved the assembly to the military base out of town, and then three people were killed, apparently by the police at the direction of the government.  Being, as I am bound, to consider the authoritarian aspects of a socialist government represented by first world activists as an egalitarian utopia, I resignedly assumed that MAS was taking that familiar road of reform through violence.  When I got to Cochabamba I was provided with some alternative news sources and I realized - apart from the silliness of thinking I could know a situation from a few days and a few dailies - just how much I had failed to consider the complicated picture that I was being presented with as though it was simple, and the reality that is bred by the fact that MAS, and any state goverment wanting to run itself against the neoliberal capitalist model, against a 500+ year legacy of colonization, against crippling oligarchies and stupendous social inequalities, faces a campaign begun from well below the underdog’s position.  And when that position not only gains credence but real administrative power, those who have benefited from this previous set-up will use all of their ample means to prevent it from being taken away.  So they can rightly say that ‘Evo Assesino’ killed three innocent members of el pueblo who were just fighting against authoritarianism.  These terrible deaths (not the result of bullets fired by state police, but of crossfires much more confusing and insidious) became the collateral for those being threatened with the loss of their power to say there is no democracy in Bolivia, to say that pro-democracy protesters are being murdered by the state, that democratically elected local governments are being destroyed and that is why the international referees of democracy should step in before a socialist dictatorship is established in Bolivia.  I got the shivers watching the news the night before I left Santa Cruz, seeing the prefects roll into Washington seeking US support.  More than one activist in Cochabamba noted a few similarities between this moment in Bolivia and that before the 1973 coup in Chile. 

Power will do what it can to maintain itself, including making itself appear vulnerable and threatened.  And all the while knuckles are cracking in Santa Cruz mansions (pictured) as strategy is discussed, the shiny 4 wheel drives line up outside the plaza where their ‘oppressed’ drivers are ‘on strike’, and kids crowd around me with feisty, famished eyes and ask me to buy them lunch.

It’s comeback time for:

1.  Nick Sherry

2. Jenny Macklin

3. Simon Crean

Parliamentary life can be a long, lo-o-ng, haul.