"Where is the wisdom that is lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge that is lost in information?"
- T.S. Eliot
So a funny thing happened to me in eighth grade geography class. That was the first time & place I learned about Bolivia, which seemed impossibly exotic and far away from the suburban Ohio junior high school I was attending. We learned in class that Bolivia suffered from a surfeit of water during the rainy season, when flooding was a severe problem. But then in the dry season, the country endured drought conditions. Many Bolivians had trouble getting enough water to drink or to cook with or to wash. In my wise-ass way (at least I was paying attention to the topic at hand) I suggested that what Bolivia needed was a giant funnel to catch the rain and gather it for storage during the rains for use in the dry season. It was both a flip comment and a sincere one, if you can permit such a paradox...
Well, my suggestion was met with raucous ridicule. The laughter did not end with that class period. My "bizarre" suggestion followed me to the end of my middle school days. In the final issue of "The River Ripple," our school newspaper, each departing grad was listed with what they were taking with them and what they were leaving behind. Among my "bequests" was my "giant funnel, which he leaves to Bolivia." Odd shit, right? So now it's half a century later and I actually live in Bolivia. And nothing reported in our 8th grade geography book has changed. And guess what, folks? I stand by my story.
This country really does need some way to retain and store water for the terrible dry times, a reservoir system to preserve the prodigal downpours for the inevitable period of zero rainfall (which in Cochabamba, lasts from April to November) which dries up the rivers and the ground water. Bolivia fifty years ago and Bolivia today is all about water. If the U.S. really wanted to help Bolivians, not just tie them up politically, they would have constructed the Giant Funnel by now, or some equivalent system of covered reservoirs to alleviate the seasonal hardships which Bolivians have endured for hundreds of years, most acutely in our own century. when greater populations have depleted lakes and rivers to the crisis point. Bolivia has long been a harbinger of the coming Earth Thirst! reality. The Cochabamba "water wars" of 2000 were another telling sign of coming planetary distress.
Okay, you can all go back to your TV and pizza now...
Saturday, July 25, 2009
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Another Roadside Attraction
[Today's poster boy for good health: the guy on the motorcycle at morning rush hour wearing a flu mask, driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Salud!]
Recently we took a few weeks to get to know Ecuador a little. At one point our family was standing on the coastal highway, our baggage at the edge of the road, and I was catapulted back 40 years to my original South American hitchhiking odyssey. C,'est plus change... Here I was with my wife and two children, still waiting for a lift. But of course, some things had changed. We had two suitcases and three backpacks now, were riding busses, not hitching and were staying in decent hotels this time around.
Ecuador has its splendors, a long Pacific coast with some great beaches, and amazing hot springs, some of the most delightful I've seen, set high in the misty mountains only a couple of hours out of Quito. Quito and its suburbs sprawl across several high Andean valleys, about ten thousand feet up beneath snow-covered peaks, almost precisely on the Equator. It's kind of like being in the middle of the planet and the middle of nowhere at the same time.
Despite its many attractions, only a few of which we had time to sample, Ecuador suffers from dollarization. In 1999 the country switched from its own currency, the Sucre, to the U.S. dollar, presumably at the behest of IMF/World Bank folk worried about Ecuador's rate of inflation. But a more stable currency has not helped the many millions of marginal folks for whom the dollar standard has meant increased hardship. Of course after Bolivia, almost everyplace seems expensive. But President Correa has also introduced a substantial import tax, which makes Chilean wine, for instance, about double what it is in Cochabamba. That's hitting us where we live!
Back in 1969, when I hitched down to Chile on chump change, I had to cope with the Selective Service, since I was registered with the military draft. I walked into the Peace Corps office in Santiago offering to sign up. But they told me I had to go back to the USA and fill out lots of forms and go through official channels. They weren't hiring off the street. Then I applied for a job as an English teacher at an exclusive private girls' school. These girls had studied English since first grade, so they were reading Shakespeare and other serious formal literature. I had to borrow an old man suit (dark brown, pinstripes) and have it altered to go for my interview there. The girls were all in uniform and all giggling at me - a gangly bearded gringo only a few years older than they were. Looked like fun. The school must have been desperate because they hired me. I sent a letter to my draft board, enclosed inside another envelope I sent to a friend to be mailed from inside the U.S., as if I were still in Pennsylvania, but had been hired for this teaching gig abroad. There were some Americans on the school board. On that tenuous basis, I requested a teaching deferment, which was of course denied.
In Santiago I was hanging out with a couple of Chilean guys whose families had connections with the government. They told me I could become a Chilean citizen if I wanted. I thought about it, but didn't like the idea of cutting myself off from my country, family and friends. (And it's a lucky thing I didn't take that route. The centrist Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei was followed into office by the socialist Salvador Allende, whom the neo-Nazi psychopaths Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon decided to depose violently, ushering in the terrorist reign of Augusto Pinochet. Opting to become a Chilean at that point might have been a fatal move). So having exhausted my options (having long since exhausted my meager funds), I asked my parents to sponsor my trip home. My mother, who was worried sick that I might reach the end of the map and fall off, quickly sent the money.
My flight - a puddle jumper - seemed magical to me, taking off before sunrise from Santiago, landing in Lima in the bright red dawn, then on to Guayaquil and Bogota before Miami. What had taken me more than six months of travel overland I was able to do in one day, landing in Miami that same afternoon. Only when my plane was landing and I saw the barbed wire and all the uniformed customs officials did I realize I had made a terrible mistake. I had stuffed several small film cans full of cleaned marijuana to share with my friends. The stupidity of this move hit me hard. I was a long-haired bearded hippie, dressed in rags, with a worn-out backpack: a living, breathing cliche, painfully obvious, ripe for the picking. The customs guy looked at me with disgust, then glanced up at the clock on the wall. My eyes followed his: it was ten minutes to five. And I think that's what saved me. He didn't want to stay over his shift, wasting his time with the likes of me, bust or no bust. He waved me onward and I almost dissolved in a puddle of relief when I got past the gate.
When I arrived home it was the first week of August. I spoke with friends on the east coast who told me I should come and meet them at this rock concert that was going to happen on the weekend. My mother, still glad to see me in spite of my appearance and my continued lack of direction, decided to lend me her brand-new Chryslter Imperial for the drive to Boston and New York. So there I was, a scarecrow behind the wheel of a shiny monster machine. I saw friends in Boston and New York, where I was up all night on Friday in Greenwich Village, but bought a ticket to the rock concert - the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair - from a stranger on the street for 7 dollars. After breakfast Saturday morning I took off out of the city for Woodstock. On the way I picked up a hitchhiker, which was fortunate, because as we neared the exits to the concert, state police had blocked them off, one after another, for miles. Luckily, my rider told me he'd grown up around here and knew the back roads, so we got off when we could and doubled back on country byways. We still had to park a mile or more from the concert site, but that wasn't as bad a trek as it might have been.
It was instantly clear that meeting anyone at this overpopulated fiasco was not very likely. We came up behind an enormous crowd. The stage was visible in the distance. I skirted alongside the crowd, a wild bunch of young people in various stages of undress and drug-addled euphoric muddiness. It was hot summer but also rainy. There was no one to take my ticket. The fences had long since been torn down. I kept seeing people who looked familiar but not actually anyone I knew. What had been a year before a rather clandestine, secretive fraternity of freaks had suddenly gone mass-market mainstream. Although my fellow druggies and I had always thought, as Dylan had sung that "everybody must get stoned," now that everybody had apparently done that, it was just a little on the scary side.
I finally got to an area behind the stage. The stage itself and the crowd before it were behind one chain-link fence. There was a space to walk between that fence and another one parallel to it, perhaps separated by twenty feet. Behind the other fence was the performers's area. An overhead walkway linked the two zones. There was a helipad on the performers' waiting side for acts to take off and land, and a huge tent, like a circus tent. Dazed from lack of sleep, culture shock and the monstrous, overamped crowd, I was wandering between the two fences when I heard someone call my name. When I located the voice in the hubbub, it turned out to be my friend, Keith, his long curly blonde locks shaking as he laughed at me from behind the performers' area. It was astounding of course, but in those days the astounding was Cosmic and the Cosmic was ordained. Keith slipped me a press pass and told me where to go to get in and join him.
Once I got into the privileged zone, I noticed that he had some kind of walkie-talkie. "I'm talking to the Whale. He's up there, backstage." Whale was another college friend who had seen The Light. Turned out my two former schoolmates were helping to co-ordinate the acts who were getting ready to go on next. But they weren't just doing physical logistics. They were also helping the musicians get whatever they felt they needed to prep for their gigs. As my eyes adjusted to the scene, I noticed one guy whose only job seemed to be pulling bottles of champagne our of a barrel full of ice, opening them and handing them out. It looked like a full-time job. I recognized some people from album covers: Janis Joplin was walking around in full battle gear with a bottle in her hand. Wowsah.
Then Keith said to me, "You don't happen to have any weed on you, do you?" I felt around in my pockets and realized I did still have a film can or two from my South American trip just for emergencies. "Yeah, I do." "Well, could you roll up a couple of joints? These guys over here want to smoke before they go on..." He pointed to several guys sitting on the grassy hill. I recognized Jerry Garcia. These guys were the Grateful Dead. I told them I had some Chilean weed they could try. "Far out," said Garcia. "Don't think I've ever had Chilean weed before." So I sat down to try to roll up some joints. From our vantage point, we could look out beyond the stage to the entire meadow full of humanity. Even Garcia seemed stunned by the size of the crowd. "They say we're the third largest city in New York right now..." "Far out, man..."
After we smoked I wandered away, to leave the performers' area and look for my friends, though finding them didn't seem likely. Somehow the day had passed and night had fallen. I joined a small group (several hundred)away from the main crowd who had gathered around Joan Baez. She was doing a kind of alternative concert for people who couldn't get within decent visual distance of the main stage. Hers was the only act I heard clearly. I had to go see the movie several years later to catch any of the performers on the stage. Toward dawn on Sunday I started trying to leave. After a second night without sleep, despite the crazy high energy, I was in very shaky condition. I finally found my mother's car and slowly made my way on back roads towards the Thruway. What I should have done was lie down and sleep for a few hours. Instead, I started driving directly back to my parents' house, at the western end of the state.
Somewhere out on the New York Thruway - going full-tilt boogie - I fell asleep at the wheel. The guard rails saved my life. I woke up startled to a thundering, smashing barrage. I got the car stopped. The entire passenger side of my mother's new Chrysler was raked and ruined. The adrenalin woke me up and I drove the rest of the way home. My mother was justifiably furious, of course. I'd been home only a few days from South American trip when I took her car to Woodstock (a strange half-naked riot scene she saw on the TV news)and then wrecked it. Of course I felt terrible, as did my mother. Sorry, mom. Irresponsible hippie madness from the college grad. Kind of a bumpy re-entry. My heat shield incinerated. Hate it when that happens...
Recently we took a few weeks to get to know Ecuador a little. At one point our family was standing on the coastal highway, our baggage at the edge of the road, and I was catapulted back 40 years to my original South American hitchhiking odyssey. C,'est plus change... Here I was with my wife and two children, still waiting for a lift. But of course, some things had changed. We had two suitcases and three backpacks now, were riding busses, not hitching and were staying in decent hotels this time around.
Ecuador has its splendors, a long Pacific coast with some great beaches, and amazing hot springs, some of the most delightful I've seen, set high in the misty mountains only a couple of hours out of Quito. Quito and its suburbs sprawl across several high Andean valleys, about ten thousand feet up beneath snow-covered peaks, almost precisely on the Equator. It's kind of like being in the middle of the planet and the middle of nowhere at the same time.
Despite its many attractions, only a few of which we had time to sample, Ecuador suffers from dollarization. In 1999 the country switched from its own currency, the Sucre, to the U.S. dollar, presumably at the behest of IMF/World Bank folk worried about Ecuador's rate of inflation. But a more stable currency has not helped the many millions of marginal folks for whom the dollar standard has meant increased hardship. Of course after Bolivia, almost everyplace seems expensive. But President Correa has also introduced a substantial import tax, which makes Chilean wine, for instance, about double what it is in Cochabamba. That's hitting us where we live!
Back in 1969, when I hitched down to Chile on chump change, I had to cope with the Selective Service, since I was registered with the military draft. I walked into the Peace Corps office in Santiago offering to sign up. But they told me I had to go back to the USA and fill out lots of forms and go through official channels. They weren't hiring off the street. Then I applied for a job as an English teacher at an exclusive private girls' school. These girls had studied English since first grade, so they were reading Shakespeare and other serious formal literature. I had to borrow an old man suit (dark brown, pinstripes) and have it altered to go for my interview there. The girls were all in uniform and all giggling at me - a gangly bearded gringo only a few years older than they were. Looked like fun. The school must have been desperate because they hired me. I sent a letter to my draft board, enclosed inside another envelope I sent to a friend to be mailed from inside the U.S., as if I were still in Pennsylvania, but had been hired for this teaching gig abroad. There were some Americans on the school board. On that tenuous basis, I requested a teaching deferment, which was of course denied.
In Santiago I was hanging out with a couple of Chilean guys whose families had connections with the government. They told me I could become a Chilean citizen if I wanted. I thought about it, but didn't like the idea of cutting myself off from my country, family and friends. (And it's a lucky thing I didn't take that route. The centrist Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei was followed into office by the socialist Salvador Allende, whom the neo-Nazi psychopaths Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon decided to depose violently, ushering in the terrorist reign of Augusto Pinochet. Opting to become a Chilean at that point might have been a fatal move). So having exhausted my options (having long since exhausted my meager funds), I asked my parents to sponsor my trip home. My mother, who was worried sick that I might reach the end of the map and fall off, quickly sent the money.
My flight - a puddle jumper - seemed magical to me, taking off before sunrise from Santiago, landing in Lima in the bright red dawn, then on to Guayaquil and Bogota before Miami. What had taken me more than six months of travel overland I was able to do in one day, landing in Miami that same afternoon. Only when my plane was landing and I saw the barbed wire and all the uniformed customs officials did I realize I had made a terrible mistake. I had stuffed several small film cans full of cleaned marijuana to share with my friends. The stupidity of this move hit me hard. I was a long-haired bearded hippie, dressed in rags, with a worn-out backpack: a living, breathing cliche, painfully obvious, ripe for the picking. The customs guy looked at me with disgust, then glanced up at the clock on the wall. My eyes followed his: it was ten minutes to five. And I think that's what saved me. He didn't want to stay over his shift, wasting his time with the likes of me, bust or no bust. He waved me onward and I almost dissolved in a puddle of relief when I got past the gate.
When I arrived home it was the first week of August. I spoke with friends on the east coast who told me I should come and meet them at this rock concert that was going to happen on the weekend. My mother, still glad to see me in spite of my appearance and my continued lack of direction, decided to lend me her brand-new Chryslter Imperial for the drive to Boston and New York. So there I was, a scarecrow behind the wheel of a shiny monster machine. I saw friends in Boston and New York, where I was up all night on Friday in Greenwich Village, but bought a ticket to the rock concert - the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair - from a stranger on the street for 7 dollars. After breakfast Saturday morning I took off out of the city for Woodstock. On the way I picked up a hitchhiker, which was fortunate, because as we neared the exits to the concert, state police had blocked them off, one after another, for miles. Luckily, my rider told me he'd grown up around here and knew the back roads, so we got off when we could and doubled back on country byways. We still had to park a mile or more from the concert site, but that wasn't as bad a trek as it might have been.
It was instantly clear that meeting anyone at this overpopulated fiasco was not very likely. We came up behind an enormous crowd. The stage was visible in the distance. I skirted alongside the crowd, a wild bunch of young people in various stages of undress and drug-addled euphoric muddiness. It was hot summer but also rainy. There was no one to take my ticket. The fences had long since been torn down. I kept seeing people who looked familiar but not actually anyone I knew. What had been a year before a rather clandestine, secretive fraternity of freaks had suddenly gone mass-market mainstream. Although my fellow druggies and I had always thought, as Dylan had sung that "everybody must get stoned," now that everybody had apparently done that, it was just a little on the scary side.
I finally got to an area behind the stage. The stage itself and the crowd before it were behind one chain-link fence. There was a space to walk between that fence and another one parallel to it, perhaps separated by twenty feet. Behind the other fence was the performers's area. An overhead walkway linked the two zones. There was a helipad on the performers' waiting side for acts to take off and land, and a huge tent, like a circus tent. Dazed from lack of sleep, culture shock and the monstrous, overamped crowd, I was wandering between the two fences when I heard someone call my name. When I located the voice in the hubbub, it turned out to be my friend, Keith, his long curly blonde locks shaking as he laughed at me from behind the performers' area. It was astounding of course, but in those days the astounding was Cosmic and the Cosmic was ordained. Keith slipped me a press pass and told me where to go to get in and join him.
Once I got into the privileged zone, I noticed that he had some kind of walkie-talkie. "I'm talking to the Whale. He's up there, backstage." Whale was another college friend who had seen The Light. Turned out my two former schoolmates were helping to co-ordinate the acts who were getting ready to go on next. But they weren't just doing physical logistics. They were also helping the musicians get whatever they felt they needed to prep for their gigs. As my eyes adjusted to the scene, I noticed one guy whose only job seemed to be pulling bottles of champagne our of a barrel full of ice, opening them and handing them out. It looked like a full-time job. I recognized some people from album covers: Janis Joplin was walking around in full battle gear with a bottle in her hand. Wowsah.
Then Keith said to me, "You don't happen to have any weed on you, do you?" I felt around in my pockets and realized I did still have a film can or two from my South American trip just for emergencies. "Yeah, I do." "Well, could you roll up a couple of joints? These guys over here want to smoke before they go on..." He pointed to several guys sitting on the grassy hill. I recognized Jerry Garcia. These guys were the Grateful Dead. I told them I had some Chilean weed they could try. "Far out," said Garcia. "Don't think I've ever had Chilean weed before." So I sat down to try to roll up some joints. From our vantage point, we could look out beyond the stage to the entire meadow full of humanity. Even Garcia seemed stunned by the size of the crowd. "They say we're the third largest city in New York right now..." "Far out, man..."
After we smoked I wandered away, to leave the performers' area and look for my friends, though finding them didn't seem likely. Somehow the day had passed and night had fallen. I joined a small group (several hundred)away from the main crowd who had gathered around Joan Baez. She was doing a kind of alternative concert for people who couldn't get within decent visual distance of the main stage. Hers was the only act I heard clearly. I had to go see the movie several years later to catch any of the performers on the stage. Toward dawn on Sunday I started trying to leave. After a second night without sleep, despite the crazy high energy, I was in very shaky condition. I finally found my mother's car and slowly made my way on back roads towards the Thruway. What I should have done was lie down and sleep for a few hours. Instead, I started driving directly back to my parents' house, at the western end of the state.
Somewhere out on the New York Thruway - going full-tilt boogie - I fell asleep at the wheel. The guard rails saved my life. I woke up startled to a thundering, smashing barrage. I got the car stopped. The entire passenger side of my mother's new Chrysler was raked and ruined. The adrenalin woke me up and I drove the rest of the way home. My mother was justifiably furious, of course. I'd been home only a few days from South American trip when I took her car to Woodstock (a strange half-naked riot scene she saw on the TV news)and then wrecked it. Of course I felt terrible, as did my mother. Sorry, mom. Irresponsible hippie madness from the college grad. Kind of a bumpy re-entry. My heat shield incinerated. Hate it when that happens...
Friday, July 17, 2009
All The World's a Stage
With a little help from bottled oxygen and coca tea, members of the Skid Row theater troupe, LAPD (Los Angeles Poverty Department), landed at El Alto airport – one of the highest in the world at 13,000+ feet – near Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. Coming from sea level in Los Angeles, Tony Parker found himself dizzy and short of breath. But Cristina Lopez, a Spanish filmmaker who is shooting a documentary about the group’s Bolivian project, got him some coca tea, the local remedy for altitude sickness, and Tony was soon all right again. Cris had never met him before, but Tony, a black man with long dreadlocks, was easy for Cris to spot.
Later, when Kevin Michael Key landed and suffered similar reactions to the drastic altitude change, he ordered up some oxygen, which the airport keeps stocked for afflicted visitors. As a recovering cocaine addict, Kevin refused to drink coca tea, though some medical authorities had assured him that the coca plant does not possess the addictive properties of the finished drug that is made from it.
LAPD director John Malpede and his wife Henriette Brouwers had less trouble adjusting to the thin altiplano atomosphere above La Paz. They had just arrived from Huancayo, Peru, visiting the family of Nilo Berrocal. Nilo grew up in Peru, but emigrated to Holland, where he has lived and worked for the past 20+ years, as a theater director in Utrecht. Nilo and his wife, Babette, who directs special projects for a Dutch university, are both fluent in Spanish. Part of their task is to bring the other cast members up to speed in the language, since the play they are doing – “Agents and Assets” – is being presented for the first time ever in Spanish.
Malpede wrote the play script, based on a 1998 U.S. Congressional hearing, about the complicity of the CIA in the smuggling and dealing of crack cocaine in the United States by agents of the Nicaraguan Contras. Backed by the Reagan administration, the Contras fought against the democratically elected leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan called the Contras “freedom fighters,” but Congress denied them U.S. funding. So the Contras turned to drug smuggling to fund their anti-Sandinista military actions, with the acquiescence of the CIA, who permitted and abetted the Contra drug operation.
The hearing reveals the hypocrisy of lawmakers who decry illegal drugs, even as they refuse to sanction the CIA for enabling millions of Americans to become cocaine addicts, to pay for an illegal war. Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. LAPD actors and others who play the twelve committee members and the CIA inspector general called to testify, are men and women who have been personally affected by illegal drugs and the “war” against them. Some have suffered addiction or incarceration. Speaking the words of hypocritical lawmakers who permit systemic abuse is their witness against their false sentiments.
“Agents & Assets” began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. The “second act” of the show is a discussion, led by a moderator and a couple of speakers, who relate current and/or local issues to the themes of the play. With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the show showed its political potency. But “Agents & Assets” also proved relevant in Europe – in England and Holland and Belgium – which suffer their own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws.
Now, perhaps most explosively, the play, titled “Agentes y Activos” for Bolivian audiences, has come to a place where much cocaine originates. Relations between the United States and Bolivia have worsened in recent years. Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of any South American country, has been for many years, and remains, the head of the federation of coca growers. The Bush administration accused Morales of failing to stem the tide of cocaine production and distribution. In turn, Morales accused the U.S. of meddling in Bolivian affairs, plotting with his political enemies to overthrow his government.
Both countries expelled each other’s ambassadors. The U.S. ended its preferential trade terms with Bolivia, citing the country’s lack of drug enforcement cooperation. In retaliation, Bolivia threw out U.S. government employees working in its territory: the DEA, AID and Peace Corps. Morales and some U.S. officials have expressed a cautious optimism that relations between the two countries may improve in the Obama era. But the Bolivian president has accused the United States of complicity in the Honduras military coup. Emotions remain raw and official relations, tense.
Into this edgy political environment, the Skid Row L.A. players have come to share the stage with some of their Bolivian counterparts, who have also suffered ill effects from the illegal drug trade and the official combat against it. Government officials and Bolivian media have shown strong interest in a project combining the efforts of Americans and Bolivians. Can ordinary citizens of both countries – using theater – define a common ground and create a more constructive dialog than their governments? After several weeks of rehearsals in Cochabamba, the play will tour the country, from LaPaz to Sucre to Santa Cruz.
John Malpede founded the LAPD (whose initials mock the police force who harassed many of their members) in 1985. A rising theater performer of national reputation, Malpede took a detour from personal stardom to share his theatrical knowledge with the homeless and formerly homeless denizens of Skid Row, the poorest section of Los Angeles. Branded as losers and welfare cheats by the Reagan administration, residents of Skid Row had no voice in their own destinies. Malpede empowered some of them with theatrical skills, enabling them to communicate their dilemmas to the “outside world.” Over decades the group has become increasingly articulate sophisticated, picking up information from other communities in the U.S. and beyond, making connections between poverty, globalization and militarization. They know how the drug war profits a few and victimizes many.
Malpede and the LAPD found congenial Bolivian artistic partners in Wiler Vidaurre and his wife, Zulma. Wiler and Zulma are professional actors on stage and in films. They run a school of “Artes y Talentos” in Cochabamba. Wiler and Zulma came to Malpede’s attention because of a theater program they have run in local prisons for the past eight years. Many of their prisoner performers have “graduated” to parole or to full liberty outside their jails, thanks in part to the rehabilitative aspects of their theater experiences.
The first night the group met, Wiler tried to explain the political reality here. Evo Morales is a polarizing figure, very popular in part of the country, but vilified in other parts. Wiler explained that when talking with the press, the Americans had to stress that their theater project was the product of independent artists, having nothing to do with the government. If “Agentes y Activos” is identified too closely with Evo’s policies, his many enemies – which include many media owners – would denounce the project out of hand, without considering its message or substance. This will be tricky, as the Ministry of Culture has offered some financial and logistical support.
It was important to John Malpede and Wiler Vidaurre to feature Bolivians playing the bureaucrats who – like their fellow players from L.A. – have felt the impact of the drug policies of their country. Wiler had a couple of actors in mind for parts in the play, but one of them was still on restricted parole, only allowed out of prison during the day to work. He had to return to his cell each night. Wiler appealed to a judge he knew from this prison work to let this actor rehearse in the evenings and travel when the group took the show in the road.
The judge, Yolanda, is responsible for supervising about 2000 prisoners in various stages of incarceration or parole. The judge decided to see the group for herself. She came to the first rehearsal, met the visiting gringo artists and talked with them about the play. Then Yolanda told them she had some theatrical training herself and asked if she too might join the cast. When she read the part of one of the more indignant members of the Congressional Committee – Millinder-McDonald of California – she found a sympathetic point of view. So the Bolivian “Agentes y Activos” will feature convicted drug offenders in its cast, as well as a judge who sentences and supervises them. In the many incarnations of the show this is a first.
Later, when Kevin Michael Key landed and suffered similar reactions to the drastic altitude change, he ordered up some oxygen, which the airport keeps stocked for afflicted visitors. As a recovering cocaine addict, Kevin refused to drink coca tea, though some medical authorities had assured him that the coca plant does not possess the addictive properties of the finished drug that is made from it.
LAPD director John Malpede and his wife Henriette Brouwers had less trouble adjusting to the thin altiplano atomosphere above La Paz. They had just arrived from Huancayo, Peru, visiting the family of Nilo Berrocal. Nilo grew up in Peru, but emigrated to Holland, where he has lived and worked for the past 20+ years, as a theater director in Utrecht. Nilo and his wife, Babette, who directs special projects for a Dutch university, are both fluent in Spanish. Part of their task is to bring the other cast members up to speed in the language, since the play they are doing – “Agents and Assets” – is being presented for the first time ever in Spanish.
Malpede wrote the play script, based on a 1998 U.S. Congressional hearing, about the complicity of the CIA in the smuggling and dealing of crack cocaine in the United States by agents of the Nicaraguan Contras. Backed by the Reagan administration, the Contras fought against the democratically elected leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan called the Contras “freedom fighters,” but Congress denied them U.S. funding. So the Contras turned to drug smuggling to fund their anti-Sandinista military actions, with the acquiescence of the CIA, who permitted and abetted the Contra drug operation.
The hearing reveals the hypocrisy of lawmakers who decry illegal drugs, even as they refuse to sanction the CIA for enabling millions of Americans to become cocaine addicts, to pay for an illegal war. Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. LAPD actors and others who play the twelve committee members and the CIA inspector general called to testify, are men and women who have been personally affected by illegal drugs and the “war” against them. Some have suffered addiction or incarceration. Speaking the words of hypocritical lawmakers who permit systemic abuse is their witness against their false sentiments.
“Agents & Assets” began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. The “second act” of the show is a discussion, led by a moderator and a couple of speakers, who relate current and/or local issues to the themes of the play. With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the show showed its political potency. But “Agents & Assets” also proved relevant in Europe – in England and Holland and Belgium – which suffer their own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws.
Now, perhaps most explosively, the play, titled “Agentes y Activos” for Bolivian audiences, has come to a place where much cocaine originates. Relations between the United States and Bolivia have worsened in recent years. Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of any South American country, has been for many years, and remains, the head of the federation of coca growers. The Bush administration accused Morales of failing to stem the tide of cocaine production and distribution. In turn, Morales accused the U.S. of meddling in Bolivian affairs, plotting with his political enemies to overthrow his government.
Both countries expelled each other’s ambassadors. The U.S. ended its preferential trade terms with Bolivia, citing the country’s lack of drug enforcement cooperation. In retaliation, Bolivia threw out U.S. government employees working in its territory: the DEA, AID and Peace Corps. Morales and some U.S. officials have expressed a cautious optimism that relations between the two countries may improve in the Obama era. But the Bolivian president has accused the United States of complicity in the Honduras military coup. Emotions remain raw and official relations, tense.
Into this edgy political environment, the Skid Row L.A. players have come to share the stage with some of their Bolivian counterparts, who have also suffered ill effects from the illegal drug trade and the official combat against it. Government officials and Bolivian media have shown strong interest in a project combining the efforts of Americans and Bolivians. Can ordinary citizens of both countries – using theater – define a common ground and create a more constructive dialog than their governments? After several weeks of rehearsals in Cochabamba, the play will tour the country, from LaPaz to Sucre to Santa Cruz.
John Malpede founded the LAPD (whose initials mock the police force who harassed many of their members) in 1985. A rising theater performer of national reputation, Malpede took a detour from personal stardom to share his theatrical knowledge with the homeless and formerly homeless denizens of Skid Row, the poorest section of Los Angeles. Branded as losers and welfare cheats by the Reagan administration, residents of Skid Row had no voice in their own destinies. Malpede empowered some of them with theatrical skills, enabling them to communicate their dilemmas to the “outside world.” Over decades the group has become increasingly articulate sophisticated, picking up information from other communities in the U.S. and beyond, making connections between poverty, globalization and militarization. They know how the drug war profits a few and victimizes many.
Malpede and the LAPD found congenial Bolivian artistic partners in Wiler Vidaurre and his wife, Zulma. Wiler and Zulma are professional actors on stage and in films. They run a school of “Artes y Talentos” in Cochabamba. Wiler and Zulma came to Malpede’s attention because of a theater program they have run in local prisons for the past eight years. Many of their prisoner performers have “graduated” to parole or to full liberty outside their jails, thanks in part to the rehabilitative aspects of their theater experiences.
The first night the group met, Wiler tried to explain the political reality here. Evo Morales is a polarizing figure, very popular in part of the country, but vilified in other parts. Wiler explained that when talking with the press, the Americans had to stress that their theater project was the product of independent artists, having nothing to do with the government. If “Agentes y Activos” is identified too closely with Evo’s policies, his many enemies – which include many media owners – would denounce the project out of hand, without considering its message or substance. This will be tricky, as the Ministry of Culture has offered some financial and logistical support.
It was important to John Malpede and Wiler Vidaurre to feature Bolivians playing the bureaucrats who – like their fellow players from L.A. – have felt the impact of the drug policies of their country. Wiler had a couple of actors in mind for parts in the play, but one of them was still on restricted parole, only allowed out of prison during the day to work. He had to return to his cell each night. Wiler appealed to a judge he knew from this prison work to let this actor rehearse in the evenings and travel when the group took the show in the road.
The judge, Yolanda, is responsible for supervising about 2000 prisoners in various stages of incarceration or parole. The judge decided to see the group for herself. She came to the first rehearsal, met the visiting gringo artists and talked with them about the play. Then Yolanda told them she had some theatrical training herself and asked if she too might join the cast. When she read the part of one of the more indignant members of the Congressional Committee – Millinder-McDonald of California – she found a sympathetic point of view. So the Bolivian “Agentes y Activos” will feature convicted drug offenders in its cast, as well as a judge who sentences and supervises them. In the many incarnations of the show this is a first.
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