not the motorcycle diaries

“Bolivia calza hoy como piecita pequeña, sirve de dato para confirmar el sabotaje malvado del sistema capitalista contra un indígena presidente. Bolivia sirve para decir frases celebres sobre los pueblos indígenas, o poner en una línea paralela de peligrosísima y delicadísima similitud Palestina, los Balcanes, Afganistán o cualquier otro punto del planeta.

…

Quiero decir que somos actoras y acotres socialise corresponsables y no simples victimas de un proceso neocolonial.”

- Extracto de Carta abierta a Naomi Klein, por Maria Galindo de Mujeres Creando, mayo 2008.

“Bolivia fits today like a little piece of pie, it serves to confirm the evil sabotage of the capitalist system against an indigenous president. Bolivia serves for the saying of celebratory words about indigenous peoples, or to place [oneself] on a parallel line of high danger and great delicacy similar to Palestine, the Balkans, Afghanistan or any other [such] point of the planet.

…

I want to say that we are corresponsible social actors [male and female] and not simple victims of a neocolonial process.”

- Extract from Open letter to Naomi Klein, by Maria Galindo of Mujeres Creando, May 2008.

(weak english translation brought to you by ana au).

I received the email below today which is funny for all sorts of reasons, not least that I had intended to go here today to protest the Mexican Government’s recent attacks on Zapatista territory; this also being the day that these protests were held.

Fri, 20 Jun 2008 16:49:52 -0600
From: Australian_Embassy_Mexico_City@dfat.gov.au
To: Undisclosed Recipients
Reply-to: embaustmex@yahoo.com.mx
Subject: AUSTRALIAN FEDERAL ELECTION - 24 NOVEMBER 2007 [SEC=UNCLASSIFIED] (more…)

“… in short, the capitalism of global neoliberalism is based on exploitation, plunder, contempt and repression of those who refuse. The same as before, but now globalized, worldwide.

But it is not so easy for neoliberal globalization, because the exploited of each country become discontented, and they will not say, well, too bad, instead they rebel. And those who remain and who are in the way resist, and they don’t allow themselves to be eliminated. And that is why we see, all over the world, those who are being screwed over making resistances, not putting up with it, in other words, they rebel, and not just in one country but wherever they abound. And so, as there is a neoliberal globalization, there is a globalization of rebellion.

And it is not just the workers of the countryside and of the city who appear in this globalization of rebellion, but others also appear who are much persecuted and despised for the same reason, for not letting themselves be dominated, like women, young people, the indigenous, homosexuals, lesbians, transsexual persons, migrants and many other groups who exist all over the world but who we do not see until they shout ya basta of being despised, and they raise up, and then we see them, we hear them, and we learn from them.

And then we see that all those groups of people are fighting against neoliberalism, against the capitalist globalization plan, and they are struggling for humanity.”

- from The Sixth Declaration of La Selva Lacandona, 2005, Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional.

(Translation from Spanish by irlandesa).

From the Aboriginal Rights Coalition:

Protest March 13 - Stop the Racist Quarantines! End the Intervention!

Support Aboriginal communities in the NT & demand an end to Howard’s racist Intervention legislation.

At the last federal election Aboriginal communities overwhelming voted Labor in a bid to end the racist, punitive and paternalistic intervention legislation, implemented by the Howard Government in a desperate attempt to hold onto Government.

Eileen Hoosan, resident of Mt Nancy town camp has argued, “These laws are like apartheid South Africa”, referring to the race based ‘welfare quarantine’ and dubbed these measures another ‘invasion’ that attacks fundamental human rights of Aboriginal people. “It’s reintroducing the ration system from forty years ago”.

Despite claims that the intervention was a response to rampant child sexual abuse no new services have received funding. Instead $88 million has been spent administering the welfare quarantining with 50% of all Centrelink payments to residents of ‘prescribed Aboriginal communities’ being withheld.

The race based intervention has required the suspension of the Racial Discrimination Act and has overridden the Northern Territory Land Rights Act.

Many women from ‘prescribed communities’ speak of the intense shame they feel and the difficulty people have had queuing with hundreds of others for hours for ration cards with many then missing out. Aboriginal community members must spend the exact amount of quarantined money which can only be spent at a limited range of stores, Woolworths, Kmart or Coles, with any unspent store voucher money returning to the Government.

Community members also complain that the welfare quarantines have caused problems getting food and many people are moving away from their communities to population centres as a result.

While the Federal Labor Government has reinstated some aspects of the permit system it has just announced the extension of welfare quarantining into many more Aboriginal communities, including the urban areas Darwin, Palmerston and Adelaide River, now impacting on some 6,500 people.

Aboriginal communities are calling for an end to this racist military intervention and for the Labor Government to honour its recent commitment stated in the Labor Government’s historic apology and at the ALP National Platform adopted in 2007, to work with Aboriginal communities and to adequately fund services and infra-structure in these communities.

Protest against the NT Intervention! Stop Racist Welfare Quarantines!
Rally 12:30 Thursday 13 March @ Redfern Centrelink, 140 Redfern St

The Aboriginal Rights Coalition (ARC) meets on Mondays 6pm on the bottom floor of the Redfern Community Centre, on The Block. Contact Greg Eatock on 0432050240 for more details.

More here. See also here.

1. The Lajamanu Walpiri community responds to police violation of a ceremonial area.

2. Steve Jampijinpa explains the five pillars of Warlpiri culture.

“Friendship is never a given in the present; it belongs to the experience of waiting, of promise, or of commitment. Its discourse is that of prayer and at issue there is that which responsibility opens to the future. (…) this minimal community … this preliminary consent without which you would not understand me … speaking the same language or praying for translation within the horizon of the same language, even were it so to manifest a disagreement … we would not be together … if a sort of friendship had not already been sealed before any other contract: a friendship prior to friendship, an ineffaceable, fundamental and bottomless friendship, the one which draws its breath in the sharing of a language (past or to come) and in the being-together that any allocution supposes.”

- Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship, The Journal of Philosophy, 1988 pp. 636.

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.

“And so, if part of my task here is to do justice, not only to my topic, but to the person I am sketching for you, the person around whom so much has been said, the person whose self-description and whose decisions have become the basis for so much … theorizing, I must be careful in presenting these words. For these words can give you only something of the person I am trying to understand, some part of that person’s verbal instance. Since I cannot truly understand this person, since I do not know this person, and have no access to this person, I am left to be a reader of a selected number of words, words that I did not fully select, ones that were selected for me, recorded from interviews and then chosen by those who decided to write their articles on this person for journals (…). So we might say that I am given fragments of this person, linguistic fragments of something called a person; what might it mean to do justice to someone under these circumstances? Can we?”

“I do not know how to judge that question here, and I am not sure it can be mine to judge. Does justice demand that I decide? Or does justice demand that I wait to decide, that I practice a certain deferral in the face of a situation in which too many have rushed to judgement?”

- Judith Butler, Undoing Gender, p.68, p.71

“It is also extremely pleasurable to be the object of Guatemalan solidarity work: to be the addressee of testimonial (…). Being hailed, or called out in this way functions like a seal of approval in these days of intense critique of the white first-world I-eye. Recourse to the politics of solidarity can offer a space of innocence for the gringa, a site cleansed by good intentions and activist “politics”, from which we can still speak unproblematically of the Other”.

- Diane Nelson, A Finger in the Wound: Body Politics in Quincentennial Guatemala, p.57

On seeing and hearing Sohaila, from RAWA, today; under the auspices of women’s and student’s activist organizations in Australia:

“When the time came for me to go on stage, after Oprah Winfrey had read [Eve Ensler’s poem] ‘Under the Burqa’; all the lights went off save for one that was aimed directly at me. I had been asked to wear my burqa, and the light streamed in through the mesh in front of my face and brought tears to my eyes. A group of singers was singing an American chant, a melody full of grief, and I was to walk as slowly as possible …. I had to climb some steps, but because of the burqa and the tears in my eyes, which wet the fabric and made it cling to my skin, I had to be helped up the stairs.

Slowly, very slowly, Oprah lifted the burqa off me and let it fall to the stage.”

– Zoya, with John Follain & Rita Cristofari, Zoya’s Story: An Afghan Woman’s Struggle for Freedom, Harper Collins, New York, 2002. Qtd. by Gillian Whitlock in ‘The Skin of the Burqa: Recent Life Narratives from Afghanistan’.

I have started writing a chapter around the themes of friendship and solidarity and thought I would procrastoresearch a little this afternoon. As I really should have known, friendship and solidarity are also favourite themes of Erich Honecker, the late Pope, and Luke Skywalker. Oh, and Stalin.