The Weather in Cochabamba

Panta Rei

2010-01-22T06:04:00.000-08:00

As municipal elections approach in Cochabamba, there is a sudden frenzy of civic improvement. After years of apparent indifference, officials seeking re-election who need some literally concrete accomplishments to point to, are quickly creating, regrading or paving roads all around the city. Of course, this improvement process causes upheaval. Roads are closed while being upgraded. Bus and trufi lines are rerouted. (TRUFIS are Taxis with fixed routes, which pick up passengers and drop them off for small charges along their ways).

Not uniquely Bolivian is the corruption which accompanies - and drives - this improvement process. For instance, a road of about four kilometers which I know well, has been in dreadful condition as long as we have lived here. The commonly accepted reason is that the politicians gave the road building contract to their friends, who gave the politicos kickbacks and used inferior materials to build with, which quickly began to degrade.

What is more typically Bolivian is that now that improvements to that crumbling road have made it more easily passable physically, it's become a perfect place to hold a protest demonstration blocking that road. Now that you could drive it in a fairly reasonable fashion you can't go down it at all, for political reasons. You must proceed instead on a circuitous route using a network of unmarked dirt roads. Lovely but inefficient, like so much of this country.

Of course politics continues to make travel everywhere more difficult, despite the technology that makes it physically fast and easy to traverse distances . In the name of security, airports have become obstacle courses, impeding the travel process. National governments have found it expeditious and lucrative to demand visas to enter and leave their domains, and to levy routine taxes on travelers and extraordinary fines on those who overstay or who mislay their documents. It's a racket, really, of the bureaucrats and security folk who profit from the "free movement" of humans about the planet, which is actually becoming less and less free in terms of cost or choice.

"Panta Rei" means, approximately, "everything flows" or perhaps "change is constant." One of my favorite translations of the phrase is "it's time for a change." And the fellow who translated panta rei that way added: "It's always time for a change." The phrase is attributed to the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, who also said things like "You can't step into the same river twice," and "the way up and the way down are the same." Anyway, dramatic changes will be happening for us, that will mean the demise of this blog in its current incarnation. We are leaving Bolivia.

The timing seems right. Evo Morales has just been inaugurated as president for a second term. When Morales first took office, five years ago, it was a moment of great uncertainty for the country. His opposition was vocal and vehement, with threats of violence from various departmental prefects (state governors) and aided by the antagonistic fumblings of the Bush administration in the United States. But Morales responded with strength and restraint. He got rid of the meddling Yankees (expelled the sleazy U.S. ambassador, Philip Goldberg, along with the DEA), found non-violent ways to marginalize the rebellious prefects and push through a new constitution, which guarantees much more justice and equality for the indigenous majority for the first time ever.

True political stability, a rare commodity in Bolivian history, now seems within the country's grasp. While the greatest fears of the oligarchs (disenfranchisement) have not been realized, the Morales government has begun to divest some feudal land barons of the east of some of their fiefdoms, confiscating some of the vast holdings where agro-emperors like Branko Marinkovic and the American Larson family have acted as laws unto themselves. Morales does seem poised to share the wealth much more than before, but in a measured way, not with force. So the reaffirmation of this progressive process seems a good time for us to go. There are others who will continue to drop notes in bottles into the cyber tides about what is happening here.

Because we are leaving Bolivia, this blog will cease in its present form and name in order to make way for another one, oriented toward a different scene on a different continent. Some bloggers live in and through their blogs. For me this blog is but a byproduct of my life in Cochabamba. Some blogs appear to be open-ended and indefinite. But this one will wrap up in this entry to be left "complete" as it stands. Of course, there are bound to be connections between the land we are leaving and the new (to us) one we are entering in Africa. But that remains to be seen.

The weather in Cochabamba is the best I have ever experienced. To be eight thousand feet up in the tropics is beautiful, a lovely climatic moderation, never too hot or cold. The climate here is healthful and fruitful, with lemons and avocados and peaches growing in our own yard, along with a riotous bounty of flowers.

I shall miss the people here, who have endured and continue to endure so much poverty and struggle, but who yet manage to celebrate their existence at every possible opportunity. It has been my pleasure and privilege to live in Bolivia for 3 & 1/2 years, an experience which has changed me and helped to mold my children.

We have been fortunate to enjoy the weather in Cochabamba. May you encounter a similar bounty wherever you wander.

The Further You Travel The Less You Know

2009-09-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

American writer and composer Paul Bowles used to insist on the distinction between a "tourist" and a "traveler." Bowles lived for more than half a century in Tangier, Morocco, just across the Strait (of Gibralter) from Europe, where lots of people pass through. We had cause to ponder this distinction recently when we hosted a couple of young backpackers we had met in Ecuador. They were personable and intelligent but absolutely incurious about anything except their own travel trajectory.

Though my wife and I have lived and worked in and written about Bolivia for the past three years, our visitors did not ask us any questions except where to catch a bus or how to book a tour. They have already been "on the road" for more than a year in dozens of countries, but it's not clear what they found in any of those places beyond exotic backdrops for their photographs of themselves.

Of course, it's not where you go or how long you spend there that makes for the richest experience, it's how open you are to wherever you happen to be. As the song says: "Living is easy with eyes closed, misunderstanding all you see." We observe the world through the lenses of our own personalities and predispositions. We see what we are able to see.

In the case of many young travelers, what they see is themselves and each other, wracking up countries and sites like notches in their belts or trophies on their walls, blogging all the way. When they meet up with other travelers they trade travel tips and stories. They are not really able to Be Here Now. Passing through becomes the point. Which is not altogether pointless.

Something might happen somewhere to pull a self-absorbed our of himself or herself. For instance, Three Cups of Tea is a book about an American kid who went to climb K-2 and got lost on his way down and ended up dedicating his life to building schools in the Pakistani Himalayas. But this is exceptional. Most backpackers just rack up their list of destinations then go home and resume their acquisitive lives. They are tourists, unlike the travelers who are able to engage the people and places they encounter at some deeper level of being.

Not everyone can learn from travel, but some can and do. Some travelers are capable of outgrowing their own superficiality. After first encountering themselves in the world, they are perhaps then able to apprehend that world beyond their infantile horizon. So I do not pity or despise short-sighted backpackers. Rather, I am excited that perhaps they may put themselves in the way of accidental knowledge, beckoning from some unexpected bump along the highway of life, that might awaken them in spite of themselves, that might allow them finally to see.

Where the Movie Villains are American

2009-09-01T11:21:00.000-07:00

On my first trip to Germany, shortly after college, I learned the power of media conditioning. I had grown up watching World War Two movies on television, filled with villainous Nazis. "You vill tell us vat ve vant to know. Ve haf our vays to make you talk " Surrounded by German speakers, whom I had only ever heard as menacing movie stereotypes, I felt my heart rate gallop.

An evening at Munich's Hofbrau Haus, where beer drinkers hoist liter steins and occasionally break into song, felt like the ominous prelude to a putsch. Wasn't this how National Socialism got its start? Had I visited Japan then, my reaction surely would have been the same, since two-dimensional "sneaky Orientals" were also staples of war and post-war era American movies.

Now I live in Bolivia, where the most treacherous movie villains in local films are Americans. Hollywood movies show here too, but in Bolivian productions Americans are violent and diabolical.

For instance, currently playing in Bolivian theaters is Antonio Eguino's, Los Andes No Creen En Dios, (The Andes Don't Believe in God), set in the mountain mining town of Uyuni in the 1920s. Germans in this film are savvy, industrious prospectors. The sole British engineer is a pompous drunk. But the Americans are rough, unshaven, gun-toting spaghetti-western thugs. Three gringos rob a mining payroll, blow up a train and shoot the passengers.

The robbery has historical resonance with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. After fleeing the United States, they stole a mine payroll in southern Bolivia and died in a shootout with Bolivian authorities in 1908. If the American desperado is one stock U.S. villain, another is the corrupt U.S. official.

American Visa, released in 2006, tells the contemporary story of a Bolivian schoolteacher named Mario who wants to go to the United States to see his son in Miami. Like many other Bolivians (and Latin Americans), Mario must endure expensive, humiliating procedures to obtain a visa.

When the U.S. consul sneeringly refuses him, Mario turns to the black market, where an illicit American visa goes for five thousand dollars. Mario pawns his gold jewelry, then desperately decides to rob the pawnshop. When he finally buys the black market visa, he is appalled to learn that the person supplying it is the U.S. Consul himself. "Don't worry, teacher, the visa's good," the Consul tells him. But Mario, undone by the theft he has committed to procure the visa, never goes to the United States.

"American Visa" is cinematic revenge against U.S. bureaucrats who stonewall Bolivian visa seekers in the belief that they intend to stay and work illegally. Like many developing countries, Bolivia depends on remittances sent home by nationals working abroad, legally or not. In a real-life act of vengeance, the Bolivian government recently imposed a visa requirement for U.S. citizens visiting their country.

American officials are more flamboyantly corrupt in Rodrigo Bellot's movie, Quien Mato a la Llamita Blanca? (Who Killed the Little White Llama?).

In Bellot's satirical road picture, the American DEA official in charge of cocaine eradication in Bolivia is also a major drug trafficker.

He hires a pair of indigenous, small-time hustlers to drive a shipment of cocaine to the Brazilian border where he intends to have them busted. This cynical, hypocritical gringo is awarded the country's highest honor. Bellott presents the U.S. war on drugs as an elaborate American ruse to make huge profits and set up Bolivian fall guys in order to look virtuous in the process.

Though Bolivian President Evo Morales has not joined Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in calling George W. Bush the devil, contemporary Bolivian movies depict Americans as various sorts of demons. Such heavy-handed portrayals reflect a long-term cultural distrust of U.S. motives in South America and a frustration with U.S. attempts to dictate terms of assistance to Bolivia. Only now those sentiments are expressed in movies, not just graffiti scrawled on adobe walls.

Someday a Bolivian visiting the United States may feel nervous to find himself surrounded by the scheming, soulless gringos he knew about only from Bolivian movies.

[This piece was published a couple of years ago on CounterPunch before I started my blog, so I just thought I'd throw it in now.]

Fearful Symmetry in Bolivia

2009-08-30T08:11:00.000-07:00

Can theater succeed where diplomacy has failed? In August, artists from Skid Row Los Angeles teamed with Bolivian actors to perform a play about the War on Drugs throughout Bolivia. Drug issues have strained relations between the United States and Bolivia in recent years. And the “war” against drugs has claimed many victims in both countries. The idea of the tour was to see if the drug war play might stimulate ordinary citizens of the two countries to find common ground and create a more constructive dialog than their governments.

Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of any South American country, has been for many years, and remains, 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 of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the 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.

The California group – named the Los Angeles Poverty Department (LAPD) – has been doing radical, politically incorrect street theater for twenty-five years. Made up of recovering drug addicts and alcoholics, ex-convicts and formerly homeless men and women, the group voted to name itself with the same initials of the police force with whom many of them had sparred.

LAPD founder and director, John Malpede, wrote the play, Agents & Assets, based on a 1998 hearing transcript of the U.S. House Intelligence Committee. The Committee examined allegations of CIA complicity in the crack cocaine epidemic that ravaged minority communities in California cities. As journalist Gary Webb detailed in an explosive 1996 newspaper series, “Dark Alliance,” the CIA enabled huge shipments of cocaine to enter the United States to raise money for the anti-government forces in Nicaragua, known as the Contras.

The U.S. Congress had denied funding to the Contras. But President Reagan called them freedom fighters and compared them to America’s founding fathers. So Oliver North and the CIA found a way to get money for Contra military actions, though it meant creating a huge new class of crack addicts among America’s ethnic urban poor.

As Malpede told a Bolivian audience after one performance: “We work in the poorest part of Los Angeles, where people come when they have no place else to go and end up living in the streets. LAPD lives and works in an area affected by drugs. It was the anger of Los Angeles citizens – that the CIA might have been involved in smuggling crack cocaine into the country – that sparked these legislative hearings. These hearings are also a metaphor for all things the U.S. government does all around the world that they shouldn’t, instead of taking care of their own people.”

Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. Each performance is unique, since the “second act” is a discussion among local expert panelists, the actors and the audience about how the issues raised in the play are relevant to the “here and now” of each production.

Agents & Assets began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. . With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the play showed its political potency. Agents & Assets also proved relevant in Europe – in England and Holland and Belgium – which suffer their own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws. For its South American premiere, the play, titled Agentes y Activos in its Spanish language version, toured a country where much cocaine originates.

As the play shows, in 1998 CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz denied and obfuscated the CIA connection to Contra drug smuggling. Just this month, under pressure from the ACLU, the Agency released a highly redacted CIA Inspector General’s report about CIA torture techniques. Some of the same players were involved in both episodes. Porter Goss, chairman of the dramatized hearing, played down the allegations of CIA malfeasance in the 1980s. Later, as CIA Director under George W. Bush, Goss lobbied for keeping the torture report secret to avoid damaging America’s reputation and CIA morale. The Agency’s history of immoral, illegal acts and its failure to accomplish anything except slime the U.S. reputation is the best argument for its dissolution.

Agents & Assets 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, in order to pay for an illegal war. 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. By speaking the words of lawmakers who permit systemic abuse, the actors bear witness against them.
Bolivian media and government officials expressed interest in a project combining the efforts of Americans and Bolivians. After rehearsals and performances in Cochabamba, the show played Oruro, La Paz, El Alto, Sucre and Santa Cruz. Questions and comments in every city reflected the intense emotions the issues of the play raise about the drug war, notions of justice and international relations.

As Bolivian historian, activist and ex-government official Rafael Puente reminded audiences, though events in the play might seem remote, the same sorts of things were happening here in Bolivia at the same time. In 1980 the CIA enabled the violent “narco golpe de estado” (drug coup) of General Luis Garcia Meza. As Puente noted, former DEA agent Michael Levine wrote about these events in his book, The Big White Lie.

Ex-Gestapo chief Klaus Barbie emerged from his Bolivian hiding place to oversee the arbitrary arrests, torture and disappearances of the narco dictatorship’s political opponents. Cocaine exports reportedly totaled US$850 million in the 1980-81 period of the García Meza regime, twice the value of official government exports. Puente described the huge CIA cocaine processing plant at Huanchaka, in eastern Bolivia, where the drugs were produced to help finance this repressive regime.

The United States has always maintained a duplicitous drug policy. Officially the United States expresses moral outrage about the manufacture and importation of illicit substances. For thirty years the “war on drugs” has consumed enormous human and financial resources. But the CIA has an even longer history of dealing drugs to finance covert wars around the world the U.S. prefers not to acknowledge publicly. (see The Politics of Heroin by frequent Agents and Assets panelist Alfred McCoy). Most Americans seem unaware of this dark history. But, as one Bolivian audience member put it, “everybody knows the CIA is the biggest drug trafficker in the world.”

Former cocaine addict and current LAPD actor Kevin Michael Key told a Santa Cruz audience, “It’s in the interest of the governments to continue narco-traffic as a means of controlling the people. Criminalization is the American way. Though rehabilitation exists, many drug users are simply locked up in jail. The demand for rehabilitation has to come from the people.”

In answer to a Bolivian man’s question about whether or not Obama will change things, John Malpede opined that, “Changing drug policy is not a high priority for Obama. Changes in drug policy have come from communities or states in defiance of federal law, to reduce penalties and put treatment in place of jail time.” Malpede’s tag line for the show, that “the war of drugs imposes a military solution to a social and public health issue,” was widely printed in the Bolivian press.

Bolivians have their own defective drug war in place, thanks to Law 1008, passed in 1988 under intense pressure from the United States. Anyone accused of drug violations under what one former law school dean calls this “inhumane” law loses basic human rights, such as the presumption of innocence, the safeguards against self-incrimination, the right to a defense, to an impartial judge, to due process or to a speedy trial.

Law 1008 expands the definition of ‘trafficking’ to mean ‘to produce, possess, keep, store, transport, deliver, administer or give as a gift.’ Judges routinely hand out harsh sentences, since an accusation is tantamount to a judgment of guilt, and they fear public outrage for giving lesser punishments.

The law rewards denuncias or snitches. These snitches often turn in people for the reward money with whom they have grudges unrelated to drugs. Police routinely resort to torture to extricate confessions from the accused. Such forced confessions are all that is needed for proof of guilt in Bolivian judicial proceedings. In their book, The Weight of Law 1008 (1996), the Andean Information Network compiled heartbreaking narratives of poor, illiterate Bolivians hounded into prison because they could not pay the bribes that were demanded by officials to make their cases disappear. Several of these drug war victims report being tortured under the direction of gringo DEA agents.

On the post-show panel at one of the Oruro performances, two drug officials parried questions from the audience about Bolivia’s war on drugs. Alex Alfaro, Departmental Director of the Special Police Force to Fight Drug Trafficking, said drug production was rising in Oruro. In the year he has worked there, his forces have found seventeen cocaine labs. So far in 2009 the police have confiscated more than a ton of cocaine, as much as in all of 2008.

Alfaro said a kilo of marijuana costs one hundred dollars (U.S.) and a kilo of cocaine, $1200. He handed out anti-drug pamphlets, warning of the dire organic consequences of using marijuana, cocaine, tobacco, alcohol and inhalants. But members of the audience, unaccustomed to access to these usually invisible officials, began to ask penetrating questions.

What did Alfaro, and the public prosecutor appearing with him, Franz Villegas, think of Law 1008? Villegas fudged his opinion, merely describing it as a drug law. Kevin Michael Key asked if the men thought the CIA really was involved in drug trafficking in the 1980s as the play alleged? They did not know. Was it a good or bad for Bolivia that the Morales government had expelled the DEA? Alfaro said it was a national government decision, not his. He said he had worked with the DEA and “they supported us. Now the national government helps us fight drugs…”

A Bolivian woman said: “You are preoccupied with drug consumption and apprehension. Is there any attention being paid to the health aspects of this problem?” The two officials made no attempt to respond. Someone else asked: “Is drug enforcement a form of social control?” The public prosecutor answered that “Drug enforcement involves citizen participation. It’s everyone’s fight. Denuncias are an important part of the system.”

Someone else asked: “What about innocent people caught up and arrested under Law 1008? Like a taxi driver whose passenger might have drugs without the driver’s knowledge?” Most of the personal stories in The Weight of Law 1008 center on and decry false accusations. Villegas said: “We don’t accuse people just to accuse them. I don’t know of a single case where a taxi driver has been unfairly jailed…”

And so it went that night in Oruro, as the drug officials evaded questions and shaded their responses in ways that precisely mirrored the dynamics of Agentes y Activos, in which the CIA Inspector General danced around issues, answered questions he had not been asked or flat out lied about the CIA’s links to the Contra cocaine scandal. The show was not only relevant but was being replayed immediately afterward in an updated, Bolivian mode right out where everyone (except the officials themselves) could see it.
Agentes y Activos played theaters and schools, public plazas and even a prison, helping to show that the real struggle is not between Bolivia, where coca grows, and the United States, where much cocaine is consumed. Rather, the greater problem lies within each country, between each government and its own people.

By declaring war on drugs, the United States and Bolivia have both declared war on their own populations, but only against the small-time users and dealers, not the powerful few who profit most from the ongoing, proliferating traffic in illicit drugs. If all the world’s a stage, then it’s time for a new global act. This “war on drugs” thing isn’t playing well anywhere, in any language.

[This entry also appeared at Dissident Voice
[http://dissidentvoice.org/2009/08/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-war-on-people/]
and at The Atlantic Free Press
[http://www.atlanticfreepress.com]

James and the The Giant Funnel

2009-07-25T15:09:00.000-07:00

"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...

Another Roadside Attraction

2009-07-22T07:58:00.000-07:00

[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...

All The World's a Stage

2009-07-17T04:50:00.000-07:00

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.

Cochabamba, City of Thieves

2009-06-12T06:56:00.000-07:00

[Theme song: to the tune of "Happy Trails": "Happy entrails to you, until we eat meat again. Happy entrails to you, keep chewing until then..." (fade)]

Like God, they are everywhere and they are watching you every minute. Like snake venom, they act silently and swiftly. Like polluted air, they are all around you all the time, invisible and foul, messing with your health and sanity, not all at once, but all the time. They are the thieves of Cochabamba. You can park your car on a busy street in a decent part of town in the middle of the day, but if you leave for thirty minutes, you may loose bits and pieces of it, your mirrors, your spare tire, your brake lights, your chrome. All these have happened to me.

Does nobody notice them as they do their dirty work? That's another story. So you end up buying your car twice, once as a single unit, then again, piece by piece over time. The thieves only get a few dollars for their booty. But the price of buying back those parts is very expensive. Everyone knows where to go, the "Mercado Chino"section of La Cancha. Stealing and reselling car parts is a major industry in this city where industry barely exists, jobs are scarce and poverty is rampant. You need what sort of light? Hey, we just happen to have one of those right here, in just your size and color. Kind of pricey but... The other big business is the sale of locks and other odd devices to fit over lights and mirrors to prevent their disappearance.

Thieves here are resourceful, daring, professional and ubiquitous. Part of me admires their panache and part of me fantasizes catching them at their work and bashing their brains out. You can see the many disfigured cars on the streets, missing lights or mirrors. This city survives in part on this cannibalism, feeding off itself. You cannot put your bag or purse down anywhere, even for a minute. Someone is going to grab it. My wife's purse was stolen from the chair where she was sitting in a cafe. Another time, in the market, they took car keys and wallet as she stood there paying for something, without seeing them do it. In the LaPaz bus station, one man engaged my wife and son in converstation while his partner stole my son's backpack. Thieves steal from rich and poor alike. They are opportunistic. I have heard tell of more violent muggings on the streets, usually groups of young guys with knives (guns are rare here, thank the gods). But most theft is petty.

The anger against these pests tends to fester silently. But woe be unto those few who do get caught. You see there pictures in the tabloids. They suffer all the built-up resentment against all the thievery that occurs without punishment. They are the scapegoats for the pervasive lack of justice here. So what is called community justice takes its toll and the unlucky apprehended suspects may be tied to a tree while everyone in the barrio takes their turn whacking them with sticks like a human pinata. Or they may be set on fire or even crucified. It's not right, and it's nto pretty, but these unfortunate few must pay for the crimes of the many. The police? They only come around to inspect the charred or bloody remains of the suspected criminals. They don't actually ever investigate or enforce anything or ever apprehend anyone. They only stop people to collect money from them. I am among the estimated fifty percent of drivers who actually have licenses, just to keep the cops from fining me for not having one. So you want to steer as clear of the cops as of the thieves. It's a jungle out there.

Bump Bump Bump Down the Funny Road

2009-06-03T13:34:00.000-07:00

[Cue theme music (to the tune of "I Shot The Sheriff"): I shot the morning, but I did not shoot the afternoon, oh no, no!.....(fade out)].

As we complete three years of living in South America, I am reminded of my first foray into this part of the world, exactly forty years ago. After finishing my undergraduate degree, I spent a year in Mexico, also under an academic umbrella. It was a hilarious, mind-expanding year, in which I also achieved a modicum of Spanish language proficiency. My reasoning went something like... If Mexico is this fabulous & surprising and it's only the first country I've been to outside the U.S., what must the rest of Latin America (and the world) be like? So I decided to hit the trail and find out.

In those days of the late 1960s, the Vietnam War was on and every 18-year-old male had to register for the draft. You were also supposed to inform your draft board if you planned to leave the country. But believe it or not, boys and girls, the country was not computerized in those days and you could actually just skip out without anyone noticing. So I just skipped out.

My passport photo showed a bearded, bespectacled young man with long hair, dressed in a Guatemalan vest over a cotton plaid work shirt, ready for Experience, though short of the ready. I left the United States in the winter of 1968-69 with five hundred dollars, an absurdly small amount even then, but unthinkable today for what I had in mind, which was... well, actually, my goal was fairly vague. The idea was to see how far I could get, I guess. Never once did it occur to me to ask, And then what? And I had a college degree.

Mexico was somewhat familiar territory to me, since I had spent the year I was based in Mexico City seeing as much of the surrounding country as possible. I mostly rode busses there. But once in southern Mexico, I began to try my luck hitchhiking, though hardly anyone was doing it.

Today when my travels cross tourist destinations in Bolivia and elsewhere I see lots of young backpackers - and some old ones - and the many hostels, inns and cheap hotels and restaurants that cater to their trade. Pizza joints in Uyuni!! No one was catering to me, as a young traveler on the cheap in those days. Lonely Planet did not exist. I found a wonderful old-fashioned hardback British guide, designed for businessmen, which focussed mainly on the larger cities but had enough maps and tips to at least mitigate my complete disorientation. I just got down to southern Mexico and stuck out my thumb.

I got one great ride with three guys taking three jeeps from Guatemala City through El Salvador and into Honduras. In Costa Rica I was forced by Panamanian border unrest to fly to the Colombian resort island of San Andreas, and then on to the Colombian mainland. In my blissful ignorance, I had no idea how dangerous it was to hitchhike in Colombia. Truck drivers who picked me up insisted that I put my backpack inside the cab of the truck. As one driver explained it, on the long slow climbs up the steep mountain slopes, theives sometimes jumped down on the back of the truck as it moved. As one robber pointed his gun at the driver, to keep him driving, his accomplices would cut off and toss the cargo, dropping in on the road for their other pals. So I might lose my pack if it happened to be back there. But no truck I rode in Colombia was ever robbed. Nor was I ever accosted, though I slept often along the highway in my sleeping bag or else in the cheapest possible hotels. I did not carry any sort of weapon, not wanting to attract any sort of violence. Idiotic? Visionary? I considered myself the Fearless Voyager until one night in a bus station in Cali I ran into a young European woman traveling just as I was. When I expressed my awe and asked if she weren't ever afraid, she said that when anyone started coming on either violently or sexually, she told them tearfully of attacks by others and they turned instantly paternal and protective. But I still thought she had a lot of balls to be traveling that way.

There were some strange moments along the road. The first African village I ever saw was in Ecuador. Almost like a hallucination. I had been dropped off by a truck at the outskirts of a village along the PanAmerican Highway. My thought was simply to walk throug the village and stick out my thumb on the other side. But as I strode on through, I noticed the conical thatched roof mud huts I had seen nowhere else in Latin America, but often in movies about Africa. And everyone in the village was coal black. Villagers smiled and waved and I smiled and waved and suddenly a group of young women charged out of a hut where music was playing. "Venga, venga," they said to me. Come, come. They took my arms. "Baile, baile. Fiesta!" Their sexy smiles appealed to me and I allowed myself to be led inside the hot, crowded hut where music played at top volume and everyone was swaying to the beat. Not a single latino was there. Suddenly I was drinking shots of some potent alcohol and shouting "Viva Ecuador!" as they all shouted "Viva Los Estados Unidos!" and I danced and flirted with one young woman in particular. I shared my cigarettes and candy with everyone, having little else of interest and the party went on and on, until as if on some sort of secret signal (secret to me, at least) the whole group walked outside. At that point I realized how completely drunk I was, blind staggering drunk, apparently only held upright by the tight black crowd I was in, all of whom were shorter than I was. I did not have the wit or the focus to contemplate where I was or what it meant.

Next thing I knew a horn was honking and two young Ecuadorian guys were stuffing me into their jeep and off we went. They said it was strange to see a glassy-eyed gringo towering over the black villagers. The two young men decided I needed rescuing, so they did it. We drove up the winding mountains out of the African valley. We spoke a little in English and Spanish. At least one of the guys had been to university in the U.S. I began to feel very ill. I had the guys stop so I could get out of the car to throw up. We were on the edge of a steep drop. I was trying to aim over the side of the drop, but I was unsteady, weaving. One of the guys was trying to dance in and keep me upright without having me puke on him. Finally I threw up and passed out. Next thing I knew we were coming into a town. They could have taken everything I had (which wasn't all that much, but still...), but instead they checked me into a cheap hotel, though I remember nothing of that process. I came to with a terrible thirst and hangover in the middle of the dead silent night and wandered like a zombie in search of coca cola.

Easter I spent in a gorgeous Peruvian town high in the Andes. The locals spent hours creating murals out of flower petals on the cobbled streets for each station of the cross. This was the first time I observed the beating of the Judas. The re-enactment of the passion and crucifixion was elaborate and painstaking, lasting as least as long as the original. It was moving and astounding in the dramatic setting, with some of the highest snowy peaks in the Andes as backdrop. Before the year was over, back home in the States, I would read that most of the town was wiped out and most of its inhabitants killed in a horrible earthquake and avalanche. Disturbing.

In Lima I ran across three Australian guys who I'd met before a couple of times in other countries. They had come by ship from Oz to Acapulco. Then they worked their way south, getting drunk and laid as much as possible. They claimed they had paid a girl in El Salvador, I think it was, only a quarter for sex. These guys - who liked nothing better than to get tanked up in a bar and start singing "Friggin' in the Riggin'" among other traditional favorites - informed me that they had found the best brothel of all right here in Lima. I figured since they had done the research I would go along with them to check it out. We went to a corner of downtown Lima where cab after cab pulled up and filled up with men and pulled away. No one said a thing or needed to. These cabs were only going to one place, the huge mega-whorehouse called "El Trocadero" in the port of Callao.

Callao is a huge industrial city, filled with warehouses. But El Trocadero, actually three warehouses in a row, had a neon clown's face flashing in laughter to set it apart. Following the lead of my guides, we first went into the left-hand warehouse. We had to buy a ticket at a booth, which supposedly covered the cost of health inspections in those innocent, pre-HIV days. Then you strolled past the doorways, hundreds of them, on two levels. Women stood beside each door, trying to entice customers. Closed doors meant the occupant was occupied. The Aussies had me start on the left because these women were cheaper and less attractive than the women in the other two warehouses. It was an astonishing candy store. Then we went to the middle one, and finally the upscale side, which was full of gorgeous women. Lima is among the beauty spots for Latin women (along with Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela and.... oh, never mind) and some of these whores looked like royalty. There were men, young and old, who just hung out there, at the bar/restaurant adjacent to the halls full of women, getting ready to go again. I could understand their addiction, especially after months of celibate travel.

Sometimes in order to keep down costs I would go to a police station and ask if they would mind if I left my backpack for safety, or even if I could sleep there. One night in the southern Peruvian Andes I had a midnight bus connection to Cuzco. So I left my pack at the cop shop and went to the movies, which only cost a dime. The theater facade was only that. Once you bought the ticket and went through the front door, the actual theater had no roof, just seats before a screen in the chilly mountain night. The film was "El Buen, El Mal y El Feo," (The Good, the Bad and the Ugly), which was my first glimpse of spaghetti westerns or Clint Eastwood. Lee Van Cleef was indeed bad, but it was Eli Wallach as the Ugly Mexican who brought down the house. The movie, in English, was subtitled in Spanish, making it hard on illiterate indigenous Peruvian moviegoers. But when Clint Eastwood waited an extra moment to shoot the rope a posse was using to hang Wallach, he screamed at Eastwood: "Hijo de puta!" And the theater erupted.

Cuzco was a magical place. On the train to Machu Pichu I met a few other backpackers and we decided to hike up to the ruins from the train station rather than take the bus. We scrambled up and up over the switchbacked road, finally emerging up on the lawn of a luxury hotel outside the ruins. On the porch sat a familiar guy - who I finally realized I recognized from the Kubrick movie "2001: A Space Odyssey." It was not Keir Dullea, but the other guy on the spaceship, Gary Lockwood (I had to Google it to remember), who said, upon seeing us, "Wow, you guys are very Hemingway," which struck me as just off the mark. We had already packed food with us, so we went directly into the ruins. One of the buildings had a roof, with hay inside, where we spent the night, a really magical night, walking around the ramparts in the moonlight , getting lucky with a roll in the hay. Hey hey!

Okay, this is getting longish. No need to give the entire blow by blow, but perhaps a few words about my initial impressions of Bolivia. I was traveling by truck from Peru, across the altiplano, with other poor folk, mostly indigenous men and women who were chewing coca to ward off the cold and hunger and fatigue. I did it too and it worked, numbing out your mouth, your throat, your belly and finally your head. It was extremely cold. I took to wearing my sleeping bag for warmth, uncertain how all the others were coping. LaPaz was a dizzy city, quite literally, and I stumbled around there for a couple of days. The president of the country was killed in a helicopter accident while I was there (flew into high tension wires) and crowds took to the streets in a mood of restless uncertainty. Che Guevara had been murdered in Bolivia a couple of years earlier, and now, to my bearded visage, people were muttering "Che! Che!" and it did not make me feel good. So I truncated my visit to Bolivia and took a train to Chile, after less than ten days in the country, figuring I'd never be back. Now I live here....

Fly Icarus Airlines But Not Too High

2009-05-13T04:46:00.001-07:00

"There is hope, but not for us." - Franz Kafka

To fly direct from the United States to Bolivia, there are currently only two options: the U.S. carrier, American, and the Bolivian line, AeroSur. Having experienced American's indifferent, even sullen, service, I opted for the alternative this time. An advantage with AeroSur for me was that returning to Cochabamba laden with gifts and goodies, my luggage would be checked through. Since American only flies to LaPaz and Santa Cruz, travelers must debark in one of those cities and book a domestic flight to Cochabamba. But domestic luggage restrictions are much more stringent than the international allowances. Domestic airlines seem to derive significant income from the overweight baggage charges of unwary international travelers.

Leaving Bolivia, the AeroSur flight was late. It seemed at first as if we might get out on time. We had already boarded and were getting our seatbelt/emergency exit instructions when the engines shut down and we were herded back into the Santa Cruz terminal. There we cooled our heels for a couple more hours in the middle of the night, before reboarding and taking off. That was the weirdest delay I had ever experienced, but the return voyage would make it seem tame.

After three weeks in the USA I was more than ready to return to my family in Cochabamba. AeroSur schedules flights to leave Miami at 11 p.m., to arrive in Santa Cruz, Bolivia six and a half hours later, in time for immigration and connections. Of course our Thursday night flight was late taking off. Very late. Having come more or less directly from the gorgeous beer-soaked beach, I was ready to fall into an airborne stupor. I had cleverly booked a seat in an empty middle row at the back of the plane, where I could stretch out for the duration. By the time we boarded the plane at 3:30 a.m, the Miami airport had all but shut down and so had I. So I did not learn until later the full details of what happened next.

Even before takeoff, passengers noticed a large amount of liquid pouring from the wing. The stewardess assured them it was normal for water to slide off the wing. But... even when we were stationary and the night was dry? During takeoff, nothing appeared amiss. I was mostly unconscious by this time. But when we achieved a more stable altitude, passengers again noticed liquid cascading from the wing. They appealed to the stewardess to notify someone in the cockpit. When an officer came for a look, he immediately ran back forward. Next thing we heard was a cryptic announcement that "We are circling around to dump excess fuel before our return to Miami..."

I thought I must have dreamed it. But then we saw again the unmistakable endless lights of Miami-Dade. We landed to an overwhelming stench of gasoline and half a dozen fire trucks with flashing lights. Now I too could see the torrent of jet fuel gushing from the wing. They hustled us off the plane and said we would be leaving soon, as if we had simply left the gas cap back at the station and returned to retrieve it, screw it into place and be on our way. After a couple of hours wait, featuring breakfast out of boxes at the gate, it was clear things were not quite so simple. We boarded shuttle busses for a nearby Holiday Inn. Some passengers remained at the airport, convinced that only by staying there and making noise would they ever get out.

Throughout the process of delay, AeroSur chose never to explain what had happened or was happening or would happen. Perhaps they themselves had no clue. The absence of information allowed a vacuum which stranded passengers filled up with rumors and imaginings, exacerbating our disorientation and anxiety. We were just going to check into this hotel for a few hours until an afternoon or evening flight could be arranged. What would soon become abundantly clear was that AeroSur had no backup planes (or plans). Their major business was their shuttle run between Miami and Havana. After box lunches in the early afternoon, we were advised that no plane would arrive until night. At night, we were told that we would have to wait until morning.

Drinking beer at poolside at the generic hotel that night with other passengers, I learned the details of our potentially catastrophic fuel leak. It was only then I felt the full rush of fear, that we could have exploded in midair, or possibly run out of gas over the Amazon. Holy shit.

Why hadn't anyone noticed this problem before we took off? And after we did leave, was no one monitoring the gauges to notice the drastic drop in fuel levels? What kind of an airline were they running here? By morning, the answer was coming clearer. We were told that nothing would be available until afternoon. Now a surge of anger and revolt broke into the open. We all had things to do, places to go, people to see, etc. As just about the only non-ethnic Bolivian in the group, I said nothing. To try to placate the rising tide of righteous fury, the airline disbursed vouchers worth $300 to everyone. People demanded to be flown out immediately or else booked on other airlines, an alternative AeroSur seemed determined to avoid.

Rumors again circulated of options with American later that night or even Aerolineas Argentinas, to reroute via Buenos Aires, catching an AeroSur flight from there. Some passengers browsed the web and/or made frantic phone calls to make their own flight arrangements. Late in the morning AeroSur personnel handed out $100 bills, to cover our eating and living expenses. Some of us immediately went to a nearby restaurant to wine and dine. Were we part of an insidious experiment? Could one make a career out of flight delay? Living at the Holiday Inn, getting a hundred bucks a day, waiting for Godot Airlines to take flight? By evening of our second night in Doral (a Florida town of offices beside Miami airport), some passengers had disappeard, having booked themselves to Bolivia on American, hoping to recoup their AeroSur fares later, or with Aerolineas Argentinas to Buenos Aires. But that latter flight ended up being postponed for twelve hours, necessitating a night in the airport for those who had chosen the Argentina option, whatever might happen in Buenos Aires airport. I stayed put, refusing to jump from the briar patch into quicksand at some outrageous additional cost I might or might not be able to recoup.

By Sunday morning the separation from my clothing was taking a toll, despite multiple daily showers. A certain resignation had replaced the urgent anger of the dwindling group. Rumors of a 3 p.m. departure, another chimera shimmering in the humid Miami heat, began to seem like more than a mirage. AeroSur exchanged our $300 vouchers for round-trip tickets from Bolivia to Miami, transferable and good for one year. The good news was that they had given us each a free round-trip worth more than $700. The bad news was that it was with AeroSur, an airline most all of us had pretty much vowed never to fly again.

At the airport AeroSur greeted us with computer failure, causing more delays. Each passenger check-in seemed to take half an hour. They handed out more goodies, $15 vouchers for a meal at Chili's and a phone card good for a few months. The 3 p.m. flight did not leave until after 5, leaving us in doubt about connections in Santa Cruz. In a final gesture of goodwill, for no apparent reason, except perhaps that I was the token gringo in the group, they bumped me up to business class, a favor I had not requested. This put me next to an elderly woman who had suffered from the unkind remarks of angry passengers about the airline, which was owned by her relative. She kept her rosary beads active. When turbulence came she began to sing hymns, to the bemusement of the cabin crew.

We arrived in Santa Cruz well after midnight. But AeroSur had held their flight to Cochabamba to wait for us, pissing off the domestic passengers who ended up leaving almost four hours late. Perhaps Aero Sur has someone whose job it is to calculate how much passengers can stand. They knew it was better to annoy a whole new group of travelers than to demand anything more of those of us held hostage for three days. We finally got into Cochabamba @ 2 a.m. after a long strange trip. But as Alfred E. Neuman used to say, "All's well that ends." Es la verdad.

Love in the Time of Dengue

2009-03-10T09:16:00.000-07:00

Bolivia is currently undergoing the worst outbreak of dengue fever in its history. Tens of thousands have been infected by this mosquito-borne disease. Dozens have died. Symptoms - including headache, severe joint pain, bleeding, vomiting, rash and fever - are nasty, and painful enough to earn dengue the nickname "breakbone fever." This plague is basically raging out of control in lowland Cochabamba and the eastern Bolivian provinces, as the government lacks the recources for effective insect control. There is no vaccine and there is no effective cure, more than rest and rehydration. Most victims of the disease recover after an excruciating week or so of enduring the symptoms. Some do not. And the annual rainy season has not yet finished.

We in the city of Cochabamba have been spared only because the mosquitos cannot survive at this altitude (@ 2500 meters or 8000 feet). As the clinical facilities in the lowlands have become overwhelmed, a number of dengue sufferers have been brought to local hospitals here. It is eerie to think that Villa Tunari, the lovely tropical town we love to visit, only 3 to 4 hours from here by car, but thousands of feet lower, is suffering these horrors. We are on a high mountain island formed by the eastern slopes of the Andes, above the rising tide of this tropical illness, lapping at our city like an infected malefic sea. As global warming proceeds, the mosquito habitat will extend higher into the mountains, eventually including the residents of this high valley. Then Cochabamba will no longer be "above it all."

Refuge of any sort - from plagues, environmental desecration or political oppression - is increasingly difficult to find in this world. Does that mean we can no longer hide from our problems, but must face and deal with them?

Doing the Time Warp Again

2009-01-14T10:51:00.000-08:00

“One two and three jolly coachmen sat in an English tavern...” My two sons are singing along at the top of their lungs with the music pouring out of the car speakers. We are tooling along a gravel road in the Bolivian Andes. A herd of llamas shuffles like low-flying clouds under the jagged, snow-grazed peaks. “For tonight we’ll merr-eye be, tomorrow we’ll be sober. WHAT?”

The kids love shouting out that last word, along with the Kingston Trio. “Three Jolly Coachmen” was on their first album, released in 1958. I was a big fan. Their first half-dozen albums were part of the soundtrack of my high school life, along with rock and roll. “Hang down your head, Tom Dooley…”

For me, the Kingston Trio brings back dim Pennsylvania dorm rooms where I labored over term papers, sun-licked breezes on the Indiana lake where I sailed in the summers, and the pangs of adolescent romance. “When I was seventeen, it was a very good year…” Now those earlier associations are accompanied by others, singing with my children nearly half a century later, in another world.

Technology transfer triggers strange and wonderful juxtapositions of past and present. I long ago recorded my LPs on cassettes, for greater portability. More recently, we transferred our copious, disintegrating tape collection to the digital I-pod, a true miracle of compression. For road music, we burn discs from the I-pod for the car’s CD player. Suddenly, the past is not just prologue, it’s right here right now.

Musical themes of my previous incarnations – from ten, twenty and fifty years ago - recycle, free of my karmic baggage, for my single-digit aged children to impose their own spin, their own emotions. “Yellow Submarine,” the Beatles 1966 stoned anthem to alternative childlike realities, connects perfectly to my own children’s sensibilities. “We all live in a yellow submarine…” Yes, we all still do. And now we can laugh about it together.

Of course, not all ancient tunes find favor with my off-spring. But some oldies are surprise hits. Jonathan Richman’s “Abominable Snowman in the Supermarket” (1977) proved oddly winning. “Hear the housewives complaining to the manager, get that snow thing out of here…”

Some of Richman’s “Berserkley years” coincided with my own. I imagine he sometimes felt like the Abominable Snowman himself, a freak scandalizing the upright citizens. I know I did. But my kids know zip about metaphor and never heard of the counter-culture. They simply, instinctively, favor anarchy.

Strangest of all is my sons’ hilarity at the 1950s parody records of Stan Freberg. Freberg satirized TV shows like “Dragnet” and goofy pop tunes, like those of “Crying” Johnny Ray. He punctured the era’s cultural pomposity, rendering it ridiculous. Freberg – along with Mad Magazine - provided fresh air for those of us feeling stifled, growing up in the suburban 1950s USA. But then, I knew the music, the shows and the values he was satirizing. My kids never heard of Jack Webb or Mitch Miller.

But when the snare drummer overpowers the singer on “Yellow Rose of Texas,” or the singer annoys the hip bongo-drummer on “Day-O” and must leave the building to finish his part, my kids enjoy order being overturned for the sake of a laugh. “Wunnerful-uh, wunnerful… Thank you so very much, um uh,” says Freberg, catching the kitschy manner and music of the inexplicably super-popular Lawrence Welk.

In seventh grade, my friends and I cracked up listening to this record over and over. Freberg’s silliness exposed the formulaic foolishness of Welk’s program and the banality of popular taste. My sons know nothing of Welk, but they love it when the bubble machine runs amok, floating the Aragon Ballroom out to sea. Like those bubbles, Freberg’s satire has floated free of its target, still getting laughs half a century on, proving that the recycled pleasures of technology transfer are indeed wunnerful, wunnerful…”

The Boys in Brazil

2008-12-21T13:43:00.000-08:00

Brazil is way cool. Most Brazilians are easygoing and friendly, quick to smile and give you the thumbs up. Of course poverty and crime and all the other human infirmities exist here, but the general vibe is laidback and open. Brazil’s generosity of spirit is probably attributable in part to its size. The fifth-largest country in the world has plenty of space as well as time. But those other biggies (Canada, Russia, China and the USA) all seem terribly serious, even rather grim. Brazil is way out beyond them all in terms of cool, the ability to enjoy life moment to moment without taking it all too seriously.

Maybe it’s the tropical heat, but the racial melting pot seems much more truly melted here than in more northern climes. Africa has blended with European and indigenous peoples, with Middle Eastern and Oriental races. This mix works well, in terms of beauty and attitude, not to mention the food and the music. They'd rather fuck than fight and it shows and feels very good. The general lack of belligerence is a relief, ergo a pleasure.

Tuto bem? Brazil has @ 8 thousand kilometers of coastline, thousands of absurdly beautiful beaches, many with no one on them. We have come here for Joaquin to learn the art of surfing. At 7 he is the youngest student – probably by about 20 years – in the classes of 20-, 30-, and 40-somethings. The first group of a dozen or so students included about half Brazilians and half Europeans. People fly in and fly out from everywhere in the world just to have a go at surfing. It is a strange reality of jet age vacations to consider that one of the men hiking with us down to the beach last week and chortling at the nightly movies of himself on the waves is now back in raw, snowy Berlin. Another woman has returned to Stuttgart. Still others have returned to San Francisco, Rio de Janeiro or Brasilia. We kept the commute to the waves for another week, with another, smaller group of folk: from the USA, Canada, Belgium & Switzerland. Joaquin opted for an additional four days after his original six.

Some surf students extract themselves from their “normal” lives for a week, others for two. One man from Rio told his wife he was on a business trip. How will he explain the sand and salt in his clothing and suitcase? Joaquin is applauded and indulged by the guys (mostly 20s some early 30s) who run the surf school (Easy Drop). I could probably leave him here to live in a corner of the school and sweep up for food and surf lessons, come back in a year and find a little surf master, fluent in Portuguese. He might however by that time have lost his (marginal) abilities to read and reason. And he would no doubt have a large, ornate tattoo. One of the surf instructors - Zuketo - has a lavish tattoo that seems to relate a long, complicated south sea legend on his back and arms, making Queequeg look like a yuppie.

Some young single adults (esp. the non-Brazilians) are allergic to children, who apparently somehow threaten their notion of personal freedom. They seem less able to relate to Joaquin or the idea of him. One American woman did not hide her resentment of Joaquin's ability: "If he stayed here another month he'd be as good as they (the instructors) are, which is annoying, really..." At the evening video review of the day's waves, with many shots of Joaquin, she said: "He shouldn't be allowed to get any better..." But she was really the exception to the general feelings of good will of everyone for everyone else. But Zuketo did not help with his ill-timed hurrah at the very end for us, after a barbecue at a fabulous house up above the river in the rain forest, coming home at night in a Landrover full of surf students and staff: "Yea, Joaquin, the best surfer on the beach!" I could feel the other surfers in the class stiffen around me. Zuketo immediately went silent. It was an awkward moment and totally superfluous, even if true.

Several folks thought I should sign up for surf lessons too. Twenty, maybe even ten, years ago, I might have done it. Now I no longer suffer the urge. Let Joaquin have his chance. I am the Olde Dog. Do the surf instructors get tired of watching neophytes flounder week after week, their pale bodies stiffly posed as they wobble toward the shore? They shout encouragement to them, realizing perhaps that only one in a thousand will ever make anything of it, while the instructors take every chance to surf the biggest ones available. Fred, Joaquin’s initital teacher, is a nice enough guy, but he much prefers surfing to teaching. I can’t blame him but did get a bit annoyed as his “breaks” lengthened, thinking that I was paying him to surf. But I did not come here to complain. Suddenly Fred was gone, replaced by Chago, Ian and Zuketo, who had much more time for Joaquin. Nothing was said by me (luckily) or anyone else but the whole scene improved.

Brazil is undergoing a modern wave of European recolonization now. British, French, Swiss, Germans, et. al, loaded with money are seeking tropical redemption in hot, sexy, ample Brazil. And who can blame them? Why live in cold crowded expensive soulless Europe when you can loll about in tropical splendor among relaxed human beings with a talent for daily pleasures? One could buy or build a home on the Brazilian coast and have the whole year's mortgage paid by vacationers who spend the high season (mid December through February) renting your place. You wouldn't want to be there then anyway, with the crowds. Just enjoy the other ten months. It's a plan...

We bid a reluctant farewell to Bahia and slid on down to Curitiba and eventually, Florianopolis, about which I had heard extravagant praise for years. I was not at first enamored of the colder water, but soon got used to it and finally became a believer as we found just the right beach for us - Barra do Lagoa - with great small consistent surf. Joaquin took some more classes here and I got my quota of bodysurfing. Gorgeous. We hated to leave, but our month in Brazil was therapeutic and enticing. Both Joaquin and I hope to return, next time, for longer. Beleza. Muito obrigado.

Ch-Ch-Changes

2008-10-31T05:44:00.000-07:00

[Theme song: (to the tune of "You are my Sunshine.") "You are my moonshine, my only moonshine, You make me giddy when days are dull. You'll never know dear, how high you get me. Please please keep my moonshine jug full." (fade out)]

Abruptly the season just changed. Seven months of sunshine yielded to a drenching downpour. There was some warning: gathering clouds in the afternoons, sudden cool gusts of wind, deep thunderous rumbles and apocalyptic flashes across the night sky. The change brings relief. But like the dry season, the rains will eventually wear out their welcome too, making us long again for the sun. Farmers use the dry time to burn off their fields for planting. Along with clouds of dust that rise off the many unpaved roads around Cochabamba, the smoke hangs heavy, clouding the valley, coating every surface. These early rains are life-giving, restoring the burned grasses, transforming the slopes of the Andes from dull brown (unlike the burnished gold of California) to vibrant green again. But the rains will eventually cause the rivers to flood their banks and inundate the streets, pouring rocks and earth down the mountains and making a dangerous mess. Asi es la vida. We move from thirst to saturation then back again as balance eludes us.

Half our family left last night for a journey across three continents. Such a departure is always harder for those left behind. It will be the longest separation we have endured in our years together. An experiment in independence. Each child will be the only child of a single parent for almost two months. Each parent will have no other adult to consult about daily decisions. Will the novelty of these altered family dynamics prove amusing until we reunite at Christmas? Or like the weather will it finally prove tedious? Vamos a ver.

Word has come - as it often does these days, via internet - that Bill Rogers has died. He and I were close for some years and I considered him a mahatma: a great spirit. Like Scaramouche, he was born with a gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad. I first got to know Bill 25 years ago in a small Mexican Pacific coast fishing and beach town that was much more primitive then than now. It was surprising to see him in that raw, wild place, a large long-haired man in a wheelchair, often pushed and helped in those days by his sexy diminutive girlfriend, Karin.

We really bonded during an Easter boat trip in 1983. During Semana Santa in Mexico, everyone goes to the beach, making it crowded and crazy. Visitors also included the fishermen who ordinarily made their camps on islands some four hours from shore. To avoid the crowds, we hired a panga - the long (25 to 30 feet?) open boats local fishermen use - with a guide to take six of us out to Isla Isabel, deserted during Holy Week. Four of us lifted Bill's wheelchair into the panga from the beach. It was tricky. He was heavy and couldn't help us in any way. His chair barely fit in the center of the boat. It seemed adventuous for anyone to foray out into the ocean in such a small boat, let alone a paraplegic whom none of us would be able to save from drowning if anything happened. Was he brave or crazy? Yes and yes. We had a quantity of psylocibin mushrooms, from which the ladies cooked up a delicious electric quiche to enhance the experience. Snorkeling off the island was especially delightful. And wild Bill did manage to put on a mask and stick his head in the clear water for a look. He was always un hombre muy listo, up for anything.

We spent four or five nights on Isla Margarita, a protected sanctuary for two huge species of birds, the frigates and the boobies. The frigates (tejiras in Spanish, because their tails resemble scissors) nest in the short stumpy trees on the island. The boobies (0r bobos) lay their eggs on the ground. There was abundant fresh water there. We brought some supplies, including (not quite enough) alcohol, but depended on our fishing to supply our meals. Swimming in the daytime, fires at night. A lovely, hilarious interlude. After that trip we were friends. I saw him in several of his California homes or apartments over the years and at one point rented an apartment from him next to his house in Bonsall, where I spent a wonderful winter.

Bill broke his neck at 19, bodysurfing at Huntington Beach. He would have drowned except for the lifeguards who pulled him out. He spent a couple of years in the hospital before he could get around at all. It was excruciating for him, losing his physical capacities and all feeling from his mid-chest down. He suffered many physical complications and operations over the years. He had only partial use of his hands and arms. But he did tell me once that his injury was the best thing that ever happened to him. Because it woke him up. He overcame his initial depression and desire to die. And he got into transcendental meditation.

He went to Maharishi International University in Iowa, where he met Karin. And he traveled as a favorite courtier with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi around the United States and Europe. Bill would go in and out of the strict TM discipline for the rest of his life, but he would never lose his veneration of the Maharishi or his belief in his wisdom. As crazy as he was - and he was - Bill always maintained a strong element of spirituality in his makeup. His great capacity for laughter was a vital part of that. He loved to laugh and I loved to laugh along with him.

Bill was a schemer and a scammer, always planning some sure-fire off-beat means to riches, or else some spiritual coup, or some cominbation of the two. One time the police raided his house, guns drawn, to seize his computer because he was involved in illegal on-line sports betting. He later sold computer-generated astrological readings. He tried with varying success to help addicts beat their urges through meditation, diet and conversation.

Improbably, I lucked into two all-expenses-paid tickets to Superbowl 20 in New Orleans. Bill was the perfect person to take, a huge sports fan and fun companion. So we partied our way through the French Quarter and into the Superdome. The game itself was a blowout: the Chicago Bears chewed up and spit out the New England Patriots. But we were having way too much fun to care. In search of psychic and physical equilibrium, Bill veered from a strict dietary and abstemious regimen to wild over-consumption of booze and illegal substances. But these were only phases and facets of his steadfast quest for happiness and spiritual truth.

His last years were marred by pain that was difficult to control. He was bed-ridden and often drugged out. I visited him a few times until he told me to stop. He made it to 60, living twice as long as a paraplegic than he had in normal health. I am grateful to have known Bill. His friendship enriched my life. His story and his generous, luminous being enlarged my understanding of courage and pleasure and what life is all about. He was far more alive and intrepid than many healthier but more timorous souls. Rather than complain or bemoan his unfair fate, he chose to take as much joy from life as possible.

Bill Rogers was indeed a great spirit. I'm sorry he's gone but really glad he was here.

Watching a Steven Seagal Movie on a Venezuelan Bus

2008-10-18T14:04:00.000-07:00

The plot doesn't matter.
Nothing matters.
The massive, expressionless Seagal
plows like a deadly freighter
through oceans of flying Asian bodies,
countless disposable Ornamentals
groaning and dying
as the green flanks of the Andes
flash past our darkening windows.

Some movies go straight to video,
others, direct to Third World transportation.
The U.S. jettisons lame surplus entertainment
the way we dump tumor-causing pesticides
that fail our minimum standards.
Somebody else will suck it up.
That's globalization with a vengeance.

On the ferry from Isla Margarita
full of families with young children
the lounge TVs blasted out
The Amityville Horror - murder
and demonic possession on Long Island.
"Basura pura," said one woman.
Absolute rubbish. Yes, but hard to escape.

What must folks here think of the country
that sends them all this toxic waste?
Where a so-called religious leader
publicly advocates assassinating their president?
Venezuelans call the U.S. president "sangriento":
Bloody Bush. Maybe they figure
he's seen too many bad movies.
And now he's starring in one,
a political Steven Seagal - mumbling, oblivious, lethal.
Bodies are falling around him,
disposable humanity of several nations
including our own. But only darkness is visible
now. We need a different sort of show.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Continent

2008-10-12T11:55:00.000-07:00

Your first impression of Cochabamba depends on where you’re coming from. Flying up out of Santa Cruz, in the hot green eastern Bolivian lowlands, Cochabamba looks high and dry. About 8000 feet above sea level, the valley of Cochabamba lies seven or eight thousand feet below the eastern crest of the Andes. The lack of humidity assaults your skin and sinuses. Nights and mornings are chilly.

But if you’re coming down from La Paz, the world’s highest capital city at 12,500 feet, and its even higher El Alto airport, Cochabamba appears lush, with trees and fields of commercial crops, including flowers. The weather feels mild and the air, bracingly oxygen-rich, a relief from the sharp, thin atmosphere of the higher Andes, where hallucinogenic snowy peaks hover above the unlikely urban sprawl.

In Bolivia, geography is destiny. In this country of ecological and political extremes, Cochabamba occupies a centrist position, a middle way. If Bolivia is in many ways the beating heart of South America, Cochabamba is in a sense the heart of that heart. But, despite its aura of moderation, the city finds itself in a rhetorical and sometimes violent crossfire between the highland and lowland cultures. That topographical tension, which began centuries before the current reign of Evo Morales, Bolivia’s first indigenous president, is but one of many ethnic and economic divisions in this country.

Cochabamba is a pivotal department (as the states are called here), key to the balance of power and to whether or not Bolivia will transform into a more egalitarian, participatory democracy, as Morales proposes, or retain its traditional, hierarchical structure that has kept the indigenous Bolivian majority deep in poverty for centuries.

A few days after my arrival in Cochabamba in August 2006, the streets filled with tumult. Demonstrators marched through the city center, shouting and waving flags, adding mayhem to the already chaotic downtown traffic patterns. What an amazing coincidence, I thought, that I should land in the midst of this seismic political upheaval. When I asked taxi drivers what all the excitement was about, they shrugged. For them, such a public outpouring was just one more obstacle to avoid, another headache. How they could be so indifferent to this historical moment, I wondered. But I was greener then than the flanks of the Andes in the rainy season.

As the cabbies knew, and I later learned, there was nothing exceptional about those demonstrations. They were the typical actions of some aggrieved group seeking some form of justice: higher wages, better living or working conditions, more public services. In the United States, most policy deliberations occur outside the public eye, and protest is a limited, somewhat suspect, strategy. Many Americans seem reticent, if not apathetic, toward public policies with which they disagree. Protestors are confined to certain areas by police and promptly arrested if they venture beyond them or try to block a public thoroughfare.

Bolivian democracy frequently plays out in the streets. Such routine, raucous manifestations of need and desire reflect in part the lack of responsive institutions – judicial or legislative – to which Bolivians can appeal. Perhaps because public venting is a kind of social safety valve, the police usually make no effort to inhibit demonstrators. On the contrary, protesters here can hold motorists, and sometimes the entire city, for ransom. The best organized paros or strikes, are forecast in local media before they happen. This allows wary citizens to make plans – to stock up on food and figure alternatives for schoolchildren – before the streets become blocked.

Sometimes paros happen without warning. You head out to work or school or the grocery store and run into a blockaded street. It can happen fast. You get to the store okay but can’t get back. The best organized bloqueos use busses and cars to block the roads. More spontaneous or humble efforts simply employ rocks and tree branches or even human bodies to achieve their goal. A paro civico is a citywide blockade that tries to achieve urban paralysis, the better to get quick attention for their cause.

Police do not try to remove these blockades. If there is any official presence at all, police may warn motorists not to try to run these blockades, since any interference at these highly-charged flash points can meet with violence. Resourceful drivers learn to pursue complicated detours around such obstructions, which may lead down obscure dirt roads or into traffic jams in far flung rutted fields.

Blockading an entire city to get attention for a cause may smack of desperation. Necessity is a mean mother. Those who exist on the edge of economic catastrophe have few options when push comes to shove. Or, in Bob Dylan’s words: “When you got nothin’ you got nothin’ to lose.” Such tactics may appear crude and desperate to some foreign eyes. But compared to the rampant apathy and alienation in the United States, Bolivian democratic practice appears dynamic and socially pervasive.

Not long after our arrival in Cochabamba we met an American woman who warned us to stock up on food, a generator and other emergency supplies in case blockades might trap us in our house for long periods. Even then her warning struck us as somewhat over the top. But her husband is one of half a dozen agents in the Cochabamba office of the Drug Enforcement Agency. U.S. government employees endure a constant bombardment of “advisories” from the U.S. Embassy and aggressive/defensive tactical security advice from their employers. When the autonomy vote took place in Santa Cruz in May, the Embassy sent out countrywide “advisories” and put the DEA in lockdown. The agents had to spend the weekend in their homes.

During the Christmas season, we drove through the neighborhood where that DEA family lived, an exclusive, privileged zone, with homes behind high stone walls topped with spikes or barbed wire. The neighborhood of Manfred Reyes Villa, who was then Prefect of Cochabamba and later voted out of office by a recall referendum. We were wondering which house might belong to the DEA family when we saw huge wooden driveway doors, only slightly smaller than those which hid King Kong. A Christmas wreath, perhaps six feet in diameter, hung on the door. And beside the wreath stood a uniformed guard in a flak jacket, holding a machine gun. Not exactly “Peace on Earth, Good Will to Men,” but fairly emblematic of the official U.S. presence in Bolivia.

When we looked at places to rent, we noticed that many homes displayed a map of Bolivia dated 1859. It took us awhile to realize why. For Bolivians to whom size matters, those were the good old days. Since then Bolivia has fought – and lost – territorial wars with four of its neighbors (Brazil, Peru, Chile and Paraguay). Most painfully, by losing the War of the Pacific in 1884, Bolivia gave up its sea coast to Chile. Now the Bolivian Navy is reduced to patrolling Lake Titicaca, which is itself divided with Peru, thanks to another conflict. (A cab driver in Lima told me a lame, predictable joke about that war: “We got the titi and they got the caca.”).

These days Bolivia is a battleground for two ongoing, intersecting struggles, one national, the other international. The internal conflict is the latest incarnation of the age-old tension between the highland and lowland cultures. A fundamental – but now unspeakable – aspect of this tension is the racism of mestizos against indigenous peoples, barely concealed behind political and economic arguments. This struggle has acquired a new urgency because of two factors: the election of Evo Morales to the presidency and the recent dramatic prosperity of the lowland departments.

Raised in the Andean highlands outside the city of Oruro, Evo Morales is of Aymara descent. The Aymara and Quechua peoples are the dominant indigenous ethnic groups in highland Bolivia and Peru. Their cultures and languages predate the Incan empire. Like many internal migrants in Bolivia, Morales was forced to leave his family farm because of catastrophe. El Nino weather conditions ruined the crops and killed the animals. He moved with his family to the lowland Chapare region of Cochabamba and worked in agriculture. (The city of Cochabamba in the upland valley of the same name, is the capital of the Department of Cochabamba.)

Morales became involved in the politics of coca growing and rose in the 1980s and 90s to become the head of the coca growers’ union. Representing their interests put Morales at odds with the Bolivian national government and their U.S. backers, who wanted to eradicate coca. In 1997 Morales was elected to the national Legislature with a large majority. He objected to the growing militarization of the Chapare in the name of the drug war. In 2002 the Legislature voted to expel him, a move Morales saw as engineered by the United States.

The next chapter of the Morales saga is available for witness in an extraordinary documentary film, Our Brand Is Crisis, directed by Rachel Boynton. A behind-the-scenes look at the 2002 Bolivian presidential election, Boynton’s film offers a sharp portrait of Bolivian-American relations. U.S. political campaign consultants Stanley Greenburg, James Carville and Robert Shrum allowed Boynton incredible access to their deliberations and machinations. They had no doubt they could manipulate their candidate to victory. And they did, but with disastrous consequences.

Former Bolivian president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada (aka Goni) hired Carville and Company (GCS) to help him win back the top office, even though his previous, unpopular presidential tenure had done nothing to alleviate Bolivian poverty or unemployment. A wealthy elitist, Goni spoke Spanish with a heavy American accent that reflected his U.S. upbringing and gained him the nickname “Gringo”. His arrogance was exceeded only by that of his paid political consultants.

Goni entered the race with several significant ‘negatives.’ First, he was old, 72 (John McCain’s age). Second, in his first presidential term, from 1993 to 1997, he had promised to create 500,000 jobs, but didn’t deliver. Worse, his ‘capitalization’ program was seen as selling off the national patrimony to enrich foreigners. As GCS strategist Jeremy Rosner informed Goni early on: “Over half the electorate can’t stand you…” Goni did not look surprised to hear this. The American consultants told Goni what to say, how to dress and even how to walk and talk. While they honed Goni’s image, they also ran a series of negative ads against his main competitor, Cochabamba Mayor Manfred Reyes Villa. They raised doubts about Reyes Villa’s military connections and the source of his wealth. How did a former army captain turned city mayor get so very rich?

The third presidential contender, Evo Morales, was a distant longshot for the office until he got some unintended help. U.S. Ambassador Manuel Rocha called Morales a liar for claiming the United States wanted to assassinate him. This public American scolding lifted Morales dramatically in the polls. Goni wondered aloud to the press if the ambassador might not be on Evo’s campaign payroll.

Evo’s rise and Manfred’s fall created a photo finish. In the end Goni won the presidency with 22.5 percent of the vote, to 20.9 for Evo Morales and 20.8 for Manfred Reyes. As Carville admits in the film, the result might have been different had the election been a day earlier or later. Though he had claimed throughout the campaign to have “an emergency plan” to rescue the Bolivian economy, Goni never produced one. Six months after the election, Evo Morales led a large protest against Goni’s government. When Goni tried to raise taxes a month later, even on the poor, the country exploded in violence.

Boynton asked Rosner if he did not think it a dangerous idea to elect a man to the presidency who lacked public support. Though clearly stunned by the disintegration of public order in the early months of Goni’s reign, Rosner insisted: “This guy had the best formula” for helping the people. He admitted to feeling “frustrated” with Goni’s failure, but dismissed Morales as an “irresponsible populist.” Beyond the chatter about focus groups and the political posturing of candidates and their advisers, the hard life of the impoverished Bolivian majority continues on with no relief in sight.

After fourteen months in office, during which more than one hundred Bolivians died in anti-government violence, Goni resigned and fled the country, back to the site of his father’s political exile and his own childhood in suburban Washington, D.C. Bolivia continues to seek his extradition; the U.S. continues to refuse. A Bolivian court has also demanded the extradition of Goni’s Defense Minister, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, wanted for genocide in the “Black October” massacre of sixty anti-government protestors. Sanchez Berzain lives in Miami where he works with ex-ambassador Manuel Rocha. Jeremy Rosner could only conclude that “There are conditions that ultimately democracy can’t deal with.” Goni’s vice president, Carlos Meza, took over until new national elections were held in December 2005. Evo Morales won the presidency then with 54 percent of the vote.

At the end of the film, we learn that Carville and his associates continue to advise political campaigns worldwide. Clearly, they don’t care whom they represent, as long as they’re paid. After Carville’s performance in the 2008 Democratic primaries – featuring remarks about Judas and cojones – and his meddling in the politics of places he knows little about, the less we hear from and about him the better.
Two months after Goni’s election, Manuel Rocha was replaced as U.S. ambassador to Bolivia by David Greenlee, a man equally hostile to Evo Morales. Greenlee was succeeded in 2006 by Philip Goldberg, whom Morales accused of orchestrating support for his political opponents. Morales finally expelled Goldberg in September. Relations between Bolivia and the United States continue to be tense.

On June 9, a protest against the U.S. refusal to extradite Goni’s former Minister of Defense, Carlos Sanchez Berzain, turned violent. Marchers brought their protest to the U.S. embassy in LaPaz, where police subdued them with tear gas. Ambassador Goldberg returned to Washington for “consultations” about embassy security. In July, USAID was kicked out of the Chapare region at the request of the coca growers, who complained that American aid projects always came with strings attached, usually intended to eradicate coca crops.

Rocha’s televised anti-Morales rant resembled the frequent anti-Chavez rhetoric of George W. Bush and Condoleeza Rice. In both cases, gringo opposition has energized and legitimized the person they are trying to demonize. The vocal antagonism of the Bush regime has been a godsend to Hugo Chavez, allowing the Venezuelan demagogue a focus for his fiery, at times quixotic, crusade for a new socialism in Latin America. Morales too has gained great stature inside and outside Bolivia from the hamfisted, Manichean American attacks on his brand of populism. Chavez has made a great show of rallying to the side of Morales, his Bolivian ally against the yanqui imperialists.

Conspiracy theorists here see the hand of Chavez behind every move Morales makes. In similar fashion, the United States is rumored to be funding and nurturing all the forces of opposition to the Morales regime. There is no doubt that Venezuela and the United States are exploiting the internal divisions within Bolivia for their own ends. But to what extent the Bolivian political drama is a battle of surrogates for outside countries is not clear. Bolivians naturally resent this interference.
The United States always claims to stand for freedom. But U.S. support for the murderous Uribe regime in Colombia undermines American lip service to human rights.

Nor can Latin Americans forget the violent U.S.-backed overthrow and murder of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. They also remember the U.S.-backed coup against the democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz in 1954. And now memories of other U.S. interventions, including those in Panama, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic, are resurfacing thanks to the Bush-Cheney reactivation of the U.S. Navy’s Fourth Fleet to patrol Latin American waters.

Gunboat diplomacy and big stick intimidation hardly create favorable conditions for inter-American dialogue. Such bullyboy tactics bespeak a lack of vision and ideas, a hallmark of the Bush-Cheney years, not to mention respect for our neighbors. Paranoia is not a viable foreign policy. It only solidifies opposition to U.S. proposals and alienates the rest of the hemisphere. Problem: Everyone in Latin America already knows this; most citizens of the United States neither know nor care.

Talk About A Revolution

2008-10-05T07:17:00.000-07:00

If you believe U.S. media coverage, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez is a nutcase dictator and a “negative force” in Latin America, as Condoleeza Rice put it. But most U.S. media exhibit little independence from the official U.S. government line these days. And Bush-Cheney officials, including Rice, have proven highly unreliable, to put it politely, about, well, almost everything. Most media stories about Venezuela and Chavez repeat the same negative clichés, without offering much evidence. So I decided to go and see for myself.

To help prepare for my trip, I watched the DVD documentary, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Two Irish filmmakers went to have a look at the Chavez regime in 2002, for the same reason I did, to try to find the reality behind all the hype. Kim Bartley and Donnacha O Briain [sic] had been filming Hugo Chavez for months when the April 11 coup ousted him from power. Remarkably, they kept filming as Chavez was arrested and taken away and the grinning coup plotters announced their plans for a new order. They began by dissolving the legislature and the courts.

Even more remarkably, within two days Hugo Chavez was back in power. His loyal soldiers and palace guards had rebelled against their own mutinous commanders and helped him return to office. Huge crowds of demonstrators had surrounded the palace, demanding the return of their elected president. The pretenders fled, except for the formerly jubilant would-be Attorney General, now sulking in a palace cell. It astonished me that Chavez had even survived the coup, let alone reversed it.

The United States does not come off well in the film. Most other nations condemned the illegal usurpation of power. A televised clip shows Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer recognizing the new government, though their time in office had the lifespan of a mayfly. Fleischer said: “We know the action encouraged by the Chavez government provoked this crisis.” But before rumors of the truth had achieved coherence, Bush announced his support for the new regime. Hmm.

One of the first people I met in Caracas clarified some of the mystery about that coup and that lightning U.S. response. Eva Golinger is a lawyer and a citizen of both the United States and Venezuela. She outlined the U.S. government complicity in the coup. They knew about it beforehand and supplied financial support to the coup plotters, before and after the event. Golinger wrote a book about the U.S. involvement, The Chavez Code, based on documents obtained under the Freedom of Information act. She also wrote a sequel, Bush Versus Chavez, about the ongoing U.S. efforts since the coup to destabilize the Chavez regime, up to the present moment.

U.S. intervention in Venezuelan internal affairs is nothing new, as Golinger points out. The CIA has long influenced policy in the country. The United States military traditionally enjoyed a cozy “integration” with the Venezuelan armed forces. Chavez ended that “special” military relationship. He also stopped the enrollment of Venezuelan military officers in the notorious Fort Benning-based School of the Americas, the alma mater of many Latin American tyrants and torturers. But the United States continues to fund anti-Chavez organizations in Venezuela through the National Endowment for Democracy. The U.S. also rewards the dissident media. Almost all private media in Venezuela – and their wealthy owners – vocally oppose the Chavez presidency. Private media also colluded in the 2002 coup, blacking out some televised events and distorting others to help get rid of Chavez.

The U.S. obsession with Venezuela is not mysterious. Venezuela has one of the largest oil reserves of any country in the world and has long been a major supplier of oil to the United States, a close reliable source. But when Bush and Cheney came into office, they began to doubt the reliability of Chavez. He supplied oil to Castro’s Cuba. He revived the semi-moribund Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), and helped raise the price of a barrel from nine dollars to nearly thirty. And he visited countries the U.S. found objectionable, like Libya, Iraq and Iran.

Bush and company accused Chavez of consorting with terrorists, though Iraq and Iran were among the founding members of OPEC in 1960 along with Venezuela. Chavez was merely continuing longstanding relations, not suddenly acquiring sinister new friends. And raising the price of oil was good for the Venezuelan economy. But if Chavez is not conspiring with enemies of the United States to mess with the U.S. oil supply or support anti-U.S. terror, then what exactly is his game?

Over at the Ministry of Foreign Relations, officials in the North America section met these kinds of questions with a mixture of smiles and consternation. They find the paranoid suspicions of the Bush government absurd. But the United States is the eight hundred pound gorilla. You don’t want it rolling over on you. These diplomats had to take seriously the U.S. charges of a Chavez conspiracy against the Yankee Empire. First of all, as these young officials pointed out, Chavez did not nationalize the Venezuelan oil industry. That happened in 1976. He simply reorganized it for greater efficiency, getting rid of unnecessary administrators and creating a system of greater accountability to eliminate waste and increase profits.

The new 1999 constitution, approved by 70 percent of Venezuelans, puts the national oil industry firmly under government control. This needed to be stated explicitly because the president who preceded Chavez wanted to privatize oil. The idea now is to accumulate as much capital as possible in the treasury in order to create a new model of government, dedicated to resolve the 80 to 85 percent poverty rate that has persisted in Venezuela for many generations, despite the country’s oil wealth.

Chavez was indeed preparing for war: on poverty, hunger, illiteracy and disease. The oil Venezuela sends to Cuba yields a huge medical return. About fifteen thousand Cuban doctors are working in Venezuela, many in farflung villages and neighborhood clinics where no medical help has ever been seen before. Venezuelan students are enrolling in Cuban medical schools in growing numbers.

That national health initiative is one of twenty-one “missions” aimed at transforming the lives of impoverished Venezuelans. Basic food subsidies help meet the nutritional needs of the poor. And after two years of an all-out assault on illiteracy, UNESCO declared Venezuela free of that disability, according to my Ministry sources. That gives greater meaning to the government pledge of a free education for all Venezuelans. A 21-year-old woman named Luz Marina, whom I met later in a small northwestern Venezuela town, said she was among the first graduates of a high school in her town that did not exist ten years ago. And she claimed that the rate of university entrance for her classmates was 98 percent.

For Luz Marina, the best part of what the Chavez government calls its “Bolivarian Revolution,” is that women, children and poor country folk, who have traditionally been powerless and voiceless in society, are now included in the vision of a society for all. So the idealistic sentiments I first heard at the Ministry in Caracas – where of course I expected the official line – I heard repeated in one form or another in urban barrios and rural communities wherever I traveled.

Driving out of Caracas I was struck by several things that I would notice over and over again. One was the sheer amount of construction going on. Many buildings are going up and many new roads are being built. Venezuelan highways are modern and well-marked. But they are overwhelmed with traffic. Venezuelans enjoy the cheapest gas in the world, thanks to their government’s subsidy. The price at the pump is about twelve cents a gallon. Talk about reverse sticker shock! The good news: it’s cheap and easy to get around by car and truck in Venezuela. The bad news: everybody’s doing it. Rickety gas-guzzling dinosaurs that would have been junked in the U.S. years or decades ago share the road with mega-trucks and busses old and new. Why take public transport when you can blast around this huge gorgeous country on great roads for almost nothing? The traffic nightmare poses a challenge for Chavez’s Bolivarian Revolution.

At the city hall in Carora, a city of just over one hundred thousand in the northwest state of Lara, Mayor Julio Chavez, no relation to the president, explained the revolutionary new system of government that Carora pioneered and the rest of Venezuela has now begun to emulate. Instead of a traditional top-down system, the decision-making power comes from the bottom up, through community councils. Every neighborhood, rural and urban, in the extended municipality, can form these councils. More than five hundred exist in the Carora area alone and roughly 28,000 nationwide.

“One of my objectives from Day One was how to reduce the role of the mayor,” said Mayor Chavez. Funds are made available for local projects from the national and state governments. “I as mayor do not decide how to use these funds. One hundred percent of these budget allocations are decided by community councils.” The mayor must submit his budget requests to the councils.” One road-paving project he asked for was delayed by other priorities the council deemed more urgent.

Through an assembly made up of representatives from the community councils, a new municipal constitution was written, placing the power for political decisions with the grassroots members from all social segments. This is part of what Carora assembly president Miguel Medina called “the new geometry of power.” Another city official said, “We want the people to be the government, not to receive government decisions.” Community Councils set up committees to deal with the issues most important to them, such as building, education, health or culture. All this sounded as idealistic as Frank Capra’s movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. And as revolutionary as the musings of those who wrote the U.S. Constitution.

The “process” many Venezuelans refer to, of transforming a nearly feudal state into a truly egalitarian participatory democracy, has energized much of the country with real hope. There is a sense of fluidity and improvisation in Venezuela right now, as barrio by barrio and city by city an entire population struggles to reinvent itself. In the urban neighborhood of Carolita, part of Carora, Community Council President Maricrespo, 66, spoke excitedly of “building this future for our children and grandchildren.” She spoke of fixing up dilapidated homes and building new ones. We met at the local school, which is no longer locked when the children leave and segregated from the community, but has become a hub of activity, hosting cultural programs, a clinic run by a Cuban doctor and a community bank, as well as the community council meetings.

“Our whole municipality has become a school…” said Maricrespo. Besides the ubiquitous building in Venezuela, many citizens did seem to be dedicating their new literacy skills to study. Luz Marina later confirmed that a lot of people were studying these days, especially the women. Out of town, the tiny desert community of San Felix is home to only one hundred fifteen people, but their community council has fifteen committees. The people there raise goats and run a tile-making cooperative, producing roof tiles from mud and water and a large kiln. They had not had any government projects here in forty years. Their first council priority was to build a fence around their school to keep the goats out. San Felix one of several cooperatives I visited, including a cacao co-op on the Caribbean coast that had begun to process the raw materials into chocolate themselves, instead of sending it abroad for others to make the biggest profit.

Creating worker-owned and -run cooperatives of all sorts – bakeries, coffee plantations, farms, factories – is another goal of the Bolivarian Revolution. There is no hierarchy and no boss. Everyone receives the same wage and participates in the business decisions. Like any other business, co-ops that are well managed succeed. Those that aren’t fail. My Venezuelan youth guru, Luz Marina, said the hope was “to incorporate young people intro cooperatives, not into exploitative jobs for Pepsi and McDonald’s. We want to be truly free, not slaves of the transnational corporations, where a few get rich and the majority go nowhere.”
Well…

Okay, by now the infectious enthusiasm of the co-op workers and the giddy hopefulness of the many community council members I’d met, sampling the heady wine of participatory democracy for the first time, had really gotten to me. This so-called Bolivarian Revolution, funded by oil revenue that had suddenly gone bananas, seemed to have real legs. A spirit of hope and possibility appeared to be percolating in the most obscure corners of the republic. I needed to sober up from the intoxicating visions my travels had conjured. It was time to find the biggest naysayer possible, the pragmatic skeptic who could throw cold water on this fevered dream of an inclusive society dedicated to the common good, someone who could reveal the raw, cynical truth behind these naïve longings. And who better to rain on the Chavez parade than the man he beat for the presidency back in 1998?

Henrique Salas Romer, who ran unsuccessfully against Chavez, is the former two-term governor of the prosperous state of Carabobo. He was succeeded in this office by his son, who has served four terms. Officially retired from business and from politics, Salas Romer still maintains a suite of offices in downtown Valencia, another city undergoing a building boom. Born in Venezuela, he attended high school and university (Yale) in the United States. He speaks impeccable English.
Salas Romer began his reality check rather strangely, by comparing Venezuela to Iraq. The two countries were “very similar” in terms of their populations, poverty levels and oil reserves, he said. “Venezuela is a major buyer of arms from Russia,” he added. Then he revealed that he was going to speak at a conference in the United States on the topic: “Hugo Chavez: A Daring Pawn in the New Cold War.” Salas Romer flashed a smile he appears to have worn since his first campaign for governor. My mind raced. Was this man suggesting that the U.S. should invade Venezuela as it had invaded Iraq? Whose “pawn” was Chavez? What “cold war” did he mean?

As I took dutiful, disbelieving notes, this man who might have been president said a number of things I am not sure whether he actually believed, or simply wanted me to believe. For instance, he said that in Venezuela struggles between rich and poor, black and white and left and right simply don’t exist. Now, I haven’t been to every country in the world, but I’ve been to quite a few. And if he’s right, Venezuela would be the only country I’ve ever heard of without class, racial or political tensions.

His more outrageous assertions aside, Salas Romer said the richest people in Venezuela are backing Chavez now, though they won’t admit it, because they are making so much money. Chavez “is no longer the real ruler here, no longer in control of decisions. Despite his control of government institutions, Chavez is a weak ruler…” He said if the price of oil drops, Chavez will not be able to keep the armed forces, the business interests and the poor on his side. About the 2012 elections, in which Chavez is not eligible to run, Salas Romer said: “I don’t think he gets there.” Considering the events of 2002, and the ongoing U.S. machinations, this is a fairly ominous remark.

He spoke at length about the strengthening alliance between Venezuela and the Middle East, and Castro’s search for new allies there after the demise of the Soviet Union. But much of it seemed like a retro Cold War fantasy, unrelated to what was happening in the streets. Salas Romer seemed literally above it all, sequestered in his air conditioned aerie, with pictures of himself on horseback on the walls, perhaps imagining what might have been, or what may someday be for his son, whom he described as having more charisma that he did. Perhaps I’d have found more substantive opposition to Chavez inside the U.S. embassy.

So I left Venezuela extremely impressed by the Bolivarian Revolution and with the strong hope that it may succeed. It is indeed a process, still far from achieving its goals. But the effort and the optimism of many people I met in many places could make it happen. Formidable obstacles remain. Because this is a peaceful revolution, none of the traditional political structures have been dismantled. So the Bolivarian Revolutionary Mayor Chavez and his community councils co-exist in what must be an awkward relationship with the old Carora City Council. Are the landlords and the oligarchs just going to stand by and put up with all these changes? How will old and new be reconciled? Only time will tell.

None of what I saw in Venezuela appears in U.S. media. Are there no reporters who could take a hard look at Venezuela and tell us what’s really going on there? It’s a big story, an important story, about a country trying to remake itself into a more equitable, more rational society while much of the world is blowing each other to bits. The lack of substantive coverage about Venezuela allows a vacuum where the false and outrageous charges of the Bush administration about conditions there go unchallenged.

Those Bush lies have serious consequences for regional stability and U.S. taxpayers, just as they did in Iraq. The U.S. government wastes millions of our dollars every year to fund opposition groups in Venezuela, with the purpose of deposing Chavez, legally or not. When religious bigot Pat Robertson advocated assassinating Chavez, the Bush-Cheney junta failed to condemn his remarks.

In 2005 a right-wing Washington think tank – Center for Security Policy – published an accusatory, threatening document entitled: “What to do about Venezuela?” The answer, then as now, is keep your bloody hands off the place. The participatory democracy taking root in Venezuela is a beautiful, fragile experiment that may serve as an inspiration for other countries in Latin America and beyond. The United States must not, as one general said about Vietnam, “destroy the country in order to save it.”
*
My heartfelt thanks to Lisa Sullivan and to the Marin Interfaith Task Force on the Americas, who made my time in Venezuela fruitful and fascinating.

Driving Through Distraction

2008-09-30T08:45:00.000-07:00

[Theme song (to the tune of "Buddy Can You Spare A Dime?"): "Once I joined a movement to protest war, Now there's war all the time./Once I joined a movement to protest war, Buddy, what's your paradigm?" (fade out)]

It's hard to say which is more dangerous in Cochabamba, the intersections with signs or signals, or those without them. Traffic lights here give a false sense of order and rationality to the unwary. Seasoned drivers know to slow down on green, in case someone is running the red, sometimes at screaming speed. Miscreants often beep frantically to warn others off. But not always. Driving here is a crapshoot. Or a video game. Cabs and busses stop abruptly with no signal, sometimes in the middle of an intersection. Pedestrians, bicyclists, peddlers and animals may choose to wander - or dash - directly out in front of you at the last minute. Road work may only be marked by a few rocks or branches in front of a deep trench. Or may simply be a hole in the road. Speed bumps (called "Rompe Muelles") are frequent and frequently unmarked. The effect of these many highway imponderables is to reduce the general speed of driving, which considerably reduces the level of death and damage from the many traffic accidents here. So really, in a way, it's a rational system.