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.
Friday, January 22, 2010
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Further You Travel The Less You Know
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.
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.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Where the Movie Villains are American
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.]
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.]
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Fearful Symmetry in Bolivia
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]
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]
Saturday, July 25, 2009
James and the The Giant Funnel
"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...
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...
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
Another Roadside Attraction
[Today's poster boy for good health: the guy on the motorcycle at morning rush hour wearing a flu mask, driving the wrong way on a one-way street. Salud!]
Recently we took a few weeks to get to know Ecuador a little. At one point our family was standing on the coastal highway, our baggage at the edge of the road, and I was catapulted back 40 years to my original South American hitchhiking odyssey. C,'est plus change... Here I was with my wife and two children, still waiting for a lift. But of course, some things had changed. We had two suitcases and three backpacks now, were riding busses, not hitching and were staying in decent hotels this time around.
Ecuador has its splendors, a long Pacific coast with some great beaches, and amazing hot springs, some of the most delightful I've seen, set high in the misty mountains only a couple of hours out of Quito. Quito and its suburbs sprawl across several high Andean valleys, about ten thousand feet up beneath snow-covered peaks, almost precisely on the Equator. It's kind of like being in the middle of the planet and the middle of nowhere at the same time.
Despite its many attractions, only a few of which we had time to sample, Ecuador suffers from dollarization. In 1999 the country switched from its own currency, the Sucre, to the U.S. dollar, presumably at the behest of IMF/World Bank folk worried about Ecuador's rate of inflation. But a more stable currency has not helped the many millions of marginal folks for whom the dollar standard has meant increased hardship. Of course after Bolivia, almost everyplace seems expensive. But President Correa has also introduced a substantial import tax, which makes Chilean wine, for instance, about double what it is in Cochabamba. That's hitting us where we live!
Back in 1969, when I hitched down to Chile on chump change, I had to cope with the Selective Service, since I was registered with the military draft. I walked into the Peace Corps office in Santiago offering to sign up. But they told me I had to go back to the USA and fill out lots of forms and go through official channels. They weren't hiring off the street. Then I applied for a job as an English teacher at an exclusive private girls' school. These girls had studied English since first grade, so they were reading Shakespeare and other serious formal literature. I had to borrow an old man suit (dark brown, pinstripes) and have it altered to go for my interview there. The girls were all in uniform and all giggling at me - a gangly bearded gringo only a few years older than they were. Looked like fun. The school must have been desperate because they hired me. I sent a letter to my draft board, enclosed inside another envelope I sent to a friend to be mailed from inside the U.S., as if I were still in Pennsylvania, but had been hired for this teaching gig abroad. There were some Americans on the school board. On that tenuous basis, I requested a teaching deferment, which was of course denied.
In Santiago I was hanging out with a couple of Chilean guys whose families had connections with the government. They told me I could become a Chilean citizen if I wanted. I thought about it, but didn't like the idea of cutting myself off from my country, family and friends. (And it's a lucky thing I didn't take that route. The centrist Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei was followed into office by the socialist Salvador Allende, whom the neo-Nazi psychopaths Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon decided to depose violently, ushering in the terrorist reign of Augusto Pinochet. Opting to become a Chilean at that point might have been a fatal move). So having exhausted my options (having long since exhausted my meager funds), I asked my parents to sponsor my trip home. My mother, who was worried sick that I might reach the end of the map and fall off, quickly sent the money.
My flight - a puddle jumper - seemed magical to me, taking off before sunrise from Santiago, landing in Lima in the bright red dawn, then on to Guayaquil and Bogota before Miami. What had taken me more than six months of travel overland I was able to do in one day, landing in Miami that same afternoon. Only when my plane was landing and I saw the barbed wire and all the uniformed customs officials did I realize I had made a terrible mistake. I had stuffed several small film cans full of cleaned marijuana to share with my friends. The stupidity of this move hit me hard. I was a long-haired bearded hippie, dressed in rags, with a worn-out backpack: a living, breathing cliche, painfully obvious, ripe for the picking. The customs guy looked at me with disgust, then glanced up at the clock on the wall. My eyes followed his: it was ten minutes to five. And I think that's what saved me. He didn't want to stay over his shift, wasting his time with the likes of me, bust or no bust. He waved me onward and I almost dissolved in a puddle of relief when I got past the gate.
When I arrived home it was the first week of August. I spoke with friends on the east coast who told me I should come and meet them at this rock concert that was going to happen on the weekend. My mother, still glad to see me in spite of my appearance and my continued lack of direction, decided to lend me her brand-new Chryslter Imperial for the drive to Boston and New York. So there I was, a scarecrow behind the wheel of a shiny monster machine. I saw friends in Boston and New York, where I was up all night on Friday in Greenwich Village, but bought a ticket to the rock concert - the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair - from a stranger on the street for 7 dollars. After breakfast Saturday morning I took off out of the city for Woodstock. On the way I picked up a hitchhiker, which was fortunate, because as we neared the exits to the concert, state police had blocked them off, one after another, for miles. Luckily, my rider told me he'd grown up around here and knew the back roads, so we got off when we could and doubled back on country byways. We still had to park a mile or more from the concert site, but that wasn't as bad a trek as it might have been.
It was instantly clear that meeting anyone at this overpopulated fiasco was not very likely. We came up behind an enormous crowd. The stage was visible in the distance. I skirted alongside the crowd, a wild bunch of young people in various stages of undress and drug-addled euphoric muddiness. It was hot summer but also rainy. There was no one to take my ticket. The fences had long since been torn down. I kept seeing people who looked familiar but not actually anyone I knew. What had been a year before a rather clandestine, secretive fraternity of freaks had suddenly gone mass-market mainstream. Although my fellow druggies and I had always thought, as Dylan had sung that "everybody must get stoned," now that everybody had apparently done that, it was just a little on the scary side.
I finally got to an area behind the stage. The stage itself and the crowd before it were behind one chain-link fence. There was a space to walk between that fence and another one parallel to it, perhaps separated by twenty feet. Behind the other fence was the performers's area. An overhead walkway linked the two zones. There was a helipad on the performers' waiting side for acts to take off and land, and a huge tent, like a circus tent. Dazed from lack of sleep, culture shock and the monstrous, overamped crowd, I was wandering between the two fences when I heard someone call my name. When I located the voice in the hubbub, it turned out to be my friend, Keith, his long curly blonde locks shaking as he laughed at me from behind the performers' area. It was astounding of course, but in those days the astounding was Cosmic and the Cosmic was ordained. Keith slipped me a press pass and told me where to go to get in and join him.
Once I got into the privileged zone, I noticed that he had some kind of walkie-talkie. "I'm talking to the Whale. He's up there, backstage." Whale was another college friend who had seen The Light. Turned out my two former schoolmates were helping to co-ordinate the acts who were getting ready to go on next. But they weren't just doing physical logistics. They were also helping the musicians get whatever they felt they needed to prep for their gigs. As my eyes adjusted to the scene, I noticed one guy whose only job seemed to be pulling bottles of champagne our of a barrel full of ice, opening them and handing them out. It looked like a full-time job. I recognized some people from album covers: Janis Joplin was walking around in full battle gear with a bottle in her hand. Wowsah.
Then Keith said to me, "You don't happen to have any weed on you, do you?" I felt around in my pockets and realized I did still have a film can or two from my South American trip just for emergencies. "Yeah, I do." "Well, could you roll up a couple of joints? These guys over here want to smoke before they go on..." He pointed to several guys sitting on the grassy hill. I recognized Jerry Garcia. These guys were the Grateful Dead. I told them I had some Chilean weed they could try. "Far out," said Garcia. "Don't think I've ever had Chilean weed before." So I sat down to try to roll up some joints. From our vantage point, we could look out beyond the stage to the entire meadow full of humanity. Even Garcia seemed stunned by the size of the crowd. "They say we're the third largest city in New York right now..." "Far out, man..."
After we smoked I wandered away, to leave the performers' area and look for my friends, though finding them didn't seem likely. Somehow the day had passed and night had fallen. I joined a small group (several hundred)away from the main crowd who had gathered around Joan Baez. She was doing a kind of alternative concert for people who couldn't get within decent visual distance of the main stage. Hers was the only act I heard clearly. I had to go see the movie several years later to catch any of the performers on the stage. Toward dawn on Sunday I started trying to leave. After a second night without sleep, despite the crazy high energy, I was in very shaky condition. I finally found my mother's car and slowly made my way on back roads towards the Thruway. What I should have done was lie down and sleep for a few hours. Instead, I started driving directly back to my parents' house, at the western end of the state.
Somewhere out on the New York Thruway - going full-tilt boogie - I fell asleep at the wheel. The guard rails saved my life. I woke up startled to a thundering, smashing barrage. I got the car stopped. The entire passenger side of my mother's new Chrysler was raked and ruined. The adrenalin woke me up and I drove the rest of the way home. My mother was justifiably furious, of course. I'd been home only a few days from South American trip when I took her car to Woodstock (a strange half-naked riot scene she saw on the TV news)and then wrecked it. Of course I felt terrible, as did my mother. Sorry, mom. Irresponsible hippie madness from the college grad. Kind of a bumpy re-entry. My heat shield incinerated. Hate it when that happens...
Recently we took a few weeks to get to know Ecuador a little. At one point our family was standing on the coastal highway, our baggage at the edge of the road, and I was catapulted back 40 years to my original South American hitchhiking odyssey. C,'est plus change... Here I was with my wife and two children, still waiting for a lift. But of course, some things had changed. We had two suitcases and three backpacks now, were riding busses, not hitching and were staying in decent hotels this time around.
Ecuador has its splendors, a long Pacific coast with some great beaches, and amazing hot springs, some of the most delightful I've seen, set high in the misty mountains only a couple of hours out of Quito. Quito and its suburbs sprawl across several high Andean valleys, about ten thousand feet up beneath snow-covered peaks, almost precisely on the Equator. It's kind of like being in the middle of the planet and the middle of nowhere at the same time.
Despite its many attractions, only a few of which we had time to sample, Ecuador suffers from dollarization. In 1999 the country switched from its own currency, the Sucre, to the U.S. dollar, presumably at the behest of IMF/World Bank folk worried about Ecuador's rate of inflation. But a more stable currency has not helped the many millions of marginal folks for whom the dollar standard has meant increased hardship. Of course after Bolivia, almost everyplace seems expensive. But President Correa has also introduced a substantial import tax, which makes Chilean wine, for instance, about double what it is in Cochabamba. That's hitting us where we live!
Back in 1969, when I hitched down to Chile on chump change, I had to cope with the Selective Service, since I was registered with the military draft. I walked into the Peace Corps office in Santiago offering to sign up. But they told me I had to go back to the USA and fill out lots of forms and go through official channels. They weren't hiring off the street. Then I applied for a job as an English teacher at an exclusive private girls' school. These girls had studied English since first grade, so they were reading Shakespeare and other serious formal literature. I had to borrow an old man suit (dark brown, pinstripes) and have it altered to go for my interview there. The girls were all in uniform and all giggling at me - a gangly bearded gringo only a few years older than they were. Looked like fun. The school must have been desperate because they hired me. I sent a letter to my draft board, enclosed inside another envelope I sent to a friend to be mailed from inside the U.S., as if I were still in Pennsylvania, but had been hired for this teaching gig abroad. There were some Americans on the school board. On that tenuous basis, I requested a teaching deferment, which was of course denied.
In Santiago I was hanging out with a couple of Chilean guys whose families had connections with the government. They told me I could become a Chilean citizen if I wanted. I thought about it, but didn't like the idea of cutting myself off from my country, family and friends. (And it's a lucky thing I didn't take that route. The centrist Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei was followed into office by the socialist Salvador Allende, whom the neo-Nazi psychopaths Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon decided to depose violently, ushering in the terrorist reign of Augusto Pinochet. Opting to become a Chilean at that point might have been a fatal move). So having exhausted my options (having long since exhausted my meager funds), I asked my parents to sponsor my trip home. My mother, who was worried sick that I might reach the end of the map and fall off, quickly sent the money.
My flight - a puddle jumper - seemed magical to me, taking off before sunrise from Santiago, landing in Lima in the bright red dawn, then on to Guayaquil and Bogota before Miami. What had taken me more than six months of travel overland I was able to do in one day, landing in Miami that same afternoon. Only when my plane was landing and I saw the barbed wire and all the uniformed customs officials did I realize I had made a terrible mistake. I had stuffed several small film cans full of cleaned marijuana to share with my friends. The stupidity of this move hit me hard. I was a long-haired bearded hippie, dressed in rags, with a worn-out backpack: a living, breathing cliche, painfully obvious, ripe for the picking. The customs guy looked at me with disgust, then glanced up at the clock on the wall. My eyes followed his: it was ten minutes to five. And I think that's what saved me. He didn't want to stay over his shift, wasting his time with the likes of me, bust or no bust. He waved me onward and I almost dissolved in a puddle of relief when I got past the gate.
When I arrived home it was the first week of August. I spoke with friends on the east coast who told me I should come and meet them at this rock concert that was going to happen on the weekend. My mother, still glad to see me in spite of my appearance and my continued lack of direction, decided to lend me her brand-new Chryslter Imperial for the drive to Boston and New York. So there I was, a scarecrow behind the wheel of a shiny monster machine. I saw friends in Boston and New York, where I was up all night on Friday in Greenwich Village, but bought a ticket to the rock concert - the Woodstock Music & Arts Fair - from a stranger on the street for 7 dollars. After breakfast Saturday morning I took off out of the city for Woodstock. On the way I picked up a hitchhiker, which was fortunate, because as we neared the exits to the concert, state police had blocked them off, one after another, for miles. Luckily, my rider told me he'd grown up around here and knew the back roads, so we got off when we could and doubled back on country byways. We still had to park a mile or more from the concert site, but that wasn't as bad a trek as it might have been.
It was instantly clear that meeting anyone at this overpopulated fiasco was not very likely. We came up behind an enormous crowd. The stage was visible in the distance. I skirted alongside the crowd, a wild bunch of young people in various stages of undress and drug-addled euphoric muddiness. It was hot summer but also rainy. There was no one to take my ticket. The fences had long since been torn down. I kept seeing people who looked familiar but not actually anyone I knew. What had been a year before a rather clandestine, secretive fraternity of freaks had suddenly gone mass-market mainstream. Although my fellow druggies and I had always thought, as Dylan had sung that "everybody must get stoned," now that everybody had apparently done that, it was just a little on the scary side.
I finally got to an area behind the stage. The stage itself and the crowd before it were behind one chain-link fence. There was a space to walk between that fence and another one parallel to it, perhaps separated by twenty feet. Behind the other fence was the performers's area. An overhead walkway linked the two zones. There was a helipad on the performers' waiting side for acts to take off and land, and a huge tent, like a circus tent. Dazed from lack of sleep, culture shock and the monstrous, overamped crowd, I was wandering between the two fences when I heard someone call my name. When I located the voice in the hubbub, it turned out to be my friend, Keith, his long curly blonde locks shaking as he laughed at me from behind the performers' area. It was astounding of course, but in those days the astounding was Cosmic and the Cosmic was ordained. Keith slipped me a press pass and told me where to go to get in and join him.
Once I got into the privileged zone, I noticed that he had some kind of walkie-talkie. "I'm talking to the Whale. He's up there, backstage." Whale was another college friend who had seen The Light. Turned out my two former schoolmates were helping to co-ordinate the acts who were getting ready to go on next. But they weren't just doing physical logistics. They were also helping the musicians get whatever they felt they needed to prep for their gigs. As my eyes adjusted to the scene, I noticed one guy whose only job seemed to be pulling bottles of champagne our of a barrel full of ice, opening them and handing them out. It looked like a full-time job. I recognized some people from album covers: Janis Joplin was walking around in full battle gear with a bottle in her hand. Wowsah.
Then Keith said to me, "You don't happen to have any weed on you, do you?" I felt around in my pockets and realized I did still have a film can or two from my South American trip just for emergencies. "Yeah, I do." "Well, could you roll up a couple of joints? These guys over here want to smoke before they go on..." He pointed to several guys sitting on the grassy hill. I recognized Jerry Garcia. These guys were the Grateful Dead. I told them I had some Chilean weed they could try. "Far out," said Garcia. "Don't think I've ever had Chilean weed before." So I sat down to try to roll up some joints. From our vantage point, we could look out beyond the stage to the entire meadow full of humanity. Even Garcia seemed stunned by the size of the crowd. "They say we're the third largest city in New York right now..." "Far out, man..."
After we smoked I wandered away, to leave the performers' area and look for my friends, though finding them didn't seem likely. Somehow the day had passed and night had fallen. I joined a small group (several hundred)away from the main crowd who had gathered around Joan Baez. She was doing a kind of alternative concert for people who couldn't get within decent visual distance of the main stage. Hers was the only act I heard clearly. I had to go see the movie several years later to catch any of the performers on the stage. Toward dawn on Sunday I started trying to leave. After a second night without sleep, despite the crazy high energy, I was in very shaky condition. I finally found my mother's car and slowly made my way on back roads towards the Thruway. What I should have done was lie down and sleep for a few hours. Instead, I started driving directly back to my parents' house, at the western end of the state.
Somewhere out on the New York Thruway - going full-tilt boogie - I fell asleep at the wheel. The guard rails saved my life. I woke up startled to a thundering, smashing barrage. I got the car stopped. The entire passenger side of my mother's new Chrysler was raked and ruined. The adrenalin woke me up and I drove the rest of the way home. My mother was justifiably furious, of course. I'd been home only a few days from South American trip when I took her car to Woodstock (a strange half-naked riot scene she saw on the TV news)and then wrecked it. Of course I felt terrible, as did my mother. Sorry, mom. Irresponsible hippie madness from the college grad. Kind of a bumpy re-entry. My heat shield incinerated. Hate it when that happens...
Friday, July 17, 2009
All The World's a Stage
With a little help from bottled oxygen and coca tea, members of the Skid Row theater troupe, LAPD (Los Angeles Poverty Department), landed at El Alto airport – one of the highest in the world at 13,000+ feet – near Bolivia’s capital, La Paz. Coming from sea level in Los Angeles, Tony Parker found himself dizzy and short of breath. But Cristina Lopez, a Spanish filmmaker who is shooting a documentary about the group’s Bolivian project, got him some coca tea, the local remedy for altitude sickness, and Tony was soon all right again. Cris had never met him before, but Tony, a black man with long dreadlocks, was easy for Cris to spot.
Later, when Kevin Michael Key landed and suffered similar reactions to the drastic altitude change, he ordered up some oxygen, which the airport keeps stocked for afflicted visitors. As a recovering cocaine addict, Kevin refused to drink coca tea, though some medical authorities had assured him that the coca plant does not possess the addictive properties of the finished drug that is made from it.
LAPD director John Malpede and his wife Henriette Brouwers had less trouble adjusting to the thin altiplano atomosphere above La Paz. They had just arrived from Huancayo, Peru, visiting the family of Nilo Berrocal. Nilo grew up in Peru, but emigrated to Holland, where he has lived and worked for the past 20+ years, as a theater director in Utrecht. Nilo and his wife, Babette, who directs special projects for a Dutch university, are both fluent in Spanish. Part of their task is to bring the other cast members up to speed in the language, since the play they are doing – “Agents and Assets” – is being presented for the first time ever in Spanish.
Malpede wrote the play script, based on a 1998 U.S. Congressional hearing, about the complicity of the CIA in the smuggling and dealing of crack cocaine in the United States by agents of the Nicaraguan Contras. Backed by the Reagan administration, the Contras fought against the democratically elected leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan called the Contras “freedom fighters,” but Congress denied them U.S. funding. So the Contras turned to drug smuggling to fund their anti-Sandinista military actions, with the acquiescence of the CIA, who permitted and abetted the Contra drug operation.
The hearing reveals the hypocrisy of lawmakers who decry illegal drugs, even as they refuse to sanction the CIA for enabling millions of Americans to become cocaine addicts, to pay for an illegal war. Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. LAPD actors and others who play the twelve committee members and the CIA inspector general called to testify, are men and women who have been personally affected by illegal drugs and the “war” against them. Some have suffered addiction or incarceration. Speaking the words of hypocritical lawmakers who permit systemic abuse is their witness against their false sentiments.
“Agents & Assets” began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. The “second act” of the show is a discussion, led by a moderator and a couple of speakers, who relate current and/or local issues to the themes of the play. With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the show showed its political potency. But “Agents & Assets” also proved relevant in Europe – in England and Holland and Belgium – which suffer their own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws.
Now, perhaps most explosively, the play, titled “Agentes y Activos” for Bolivian audiences, has come to a place where much cocaine originates. Relations between the United States and Bolivia have worsened in recent years. Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of any South American country, has been for many years, and remains, the head of the federation of coca growers. The Bush administration accused Morales of failing to stem the tide of cocaine production and distribution. In turn, Morales accused the U.S. of meddling in Bolivian affairs, plotting with his political enemies to overthrow his government.
Both countries expelled each other’s ambassadors. The U.S. ended its preferential trade terms with Bolivia, citing the country’s lack of drug enforcement cooperation. In retaliation, Bolivia threw out U.S. government employees working in its territory: the DEA, AID and Peace Corps. Morales and some U.S. officials have expressed a cautious optimism that relations between the two countries may improve in the Obama era. But the Bolivian president has accused the United States of complicity in the Honduras military coup. Emotions remain raw and official relations, tense.
Into this edgy political environment, the Skid Row L.A. players have come to share the stage with some of their Bolivian counterparts, who have also suffered ill effects from the illegal drug trade and the official combat against it. Government officials and Bolivian media have shown strong interest in a project combining the efforts of Americans and Bolivians. Can ordinary citizens of both countries – using theater – define a common ground and create a more constructive dialog than their governments? After several weeks of rehearsals in Cochabamba, the play will tour the country, from LaPaz to Sucre to Santa Cruz.
John Malpede founded the LAPD (whose initials mock the police force who harassed many of their members) in 1985. A rising theater performer of national reputation, Malpede took a detour from personal stardom to share his theatrical knowledge with the homeless and formerly homeless denizens of Skid Row, the poorest section of Los Angeles. Branded as losers and welfare cheats by the Reagan administration, residents of Skid Row had no voice in their own destinies. Malpede empowered some of them with theatrical skills, enabling them to communicate their dilemmas to the “outside world.” Over decades the group has become increasingly articulate sophisticated, picking up information from other communities in the U.S. and beyond, making connections between poverty, globalization and militarization. They know how the drug war profits a few and victimizes many.
Malpede and the LAPD found congenial Bolivian artistic partners in Wiler Vidaurre and his wife, Zulma. Wiler and Zulma are professional actors on stage and in films. They run a school of “Artes y Talentos” in Cochabamba. Wiler and Zulma came to Malpede’s attention because of a theater program they have run in local prisons for the past eight years. Many of their prisoner performers have “graduated” to parole or to full liberty outside their jails, thanks in part to the rehabilitative aspects of their theater experiences.
The first night the group met, Wiler tried to explain the political reality here. Evo Morales is a polarizing figure, very popular in part of the country, but vilified in other parts. Wiler explained that when talking with the press, the Americans had to stress that their theater project was the product of independent artists, having nothing to do with the government. If “Agentes y Activos” is identified too closely with Evo’s policies, his many enemies – which include many media owners – would denounce the project out of hand, without considering its message or substance. This will be tricky, as the Ministry of Culture has offered some financial and logistical support.
It was important to John Malpede and Wiler Vidaurre to feature Bolivians playing the bureaucrats who – like their fellow players from L.A. – have felt the impact of the drug policies of their country. Wiler had a couple of actors in mind for parts in the play, but one of them was still on restricted parole, only allowed out of prison during the day to work. He had to return to his cell each night. Wiler appealed to a judge he knew from this prison work to let this actor rehearse in the evenings and travel when the group took the show in the road.
The judge, Yolanda, is responsible for supervising about 2000 prisoners in various stages of incarceration or parole. The judge decided to see the group for herself. She came to the first rehearsal, met the visiting gringo artists and talked with them about the play. Then Yolanda told them she had some theatrical training herself and asked if she too might join the cast. When she read the part of one of the more indignant members of the Congressional Committee – Millinder-McDonald of California – she found a sympathetic point of view. So the Bolivian “Agentes y Activos” will feature convicted drug offenders in its cast, as well as a judge who sentences and supervises them. In the many incarnations of the show this is a first.
Later, when Kevin Michael Key landed and suffered similar reactions to the drastic altitude change, he ordered up some oxygen, which the airport keeps stocked for afflicted visitors. As a recovering cocaine addict, Kevin refused to drink coca tea, though some medical authorities had assured him that the coca plant does not possess the addictive properties of the finished drug that is made from it.
LAPD director John Malpede and his wife Henriette Brouwers had less trouble adjusting to the thin altiplano atomosphere above La Paz. They had just arrived from Huancayo, Peru, visiting the family of Nilo Berrocal. Nilo grew up in Peru, but emigrated to Holland, where he has lived and worked for the past 20+ years, as a theater director in Utrecht. Nilo and his wife, Babette, who directs special projects for a Dutch university, are both fluent in Spanish. Part of their task is to bring the other cast members up to speed in the language, since the play they are doing – “Agents and Assets” – is being presented for the first time ever in Spanish.
Malpede wrote the play script, based on a 1998 U.S. Congressional hearing, about the complicity of the CIA in the smuggling and dealing of crack cocaine in the United States by agents of the Nicaraguan Contras. Backed by the Reagan administration, the Contras fought against the democratically elected leftist Sandinista government of Nicaragua. Reagan called the Contras “freedom fighters,” but Congress denied them U.S. funding. So the Contras turned to drug smuggling to fund their anti-Sandinista military actions, with the acquiescence of the CIA, who permitted and abetted the Contra drug operation.
The hearing reveals the hypocrisy of lawmakers who decry illegal drugs, even as they refuse to sanction the CIA for enabling millions of Americans to become cocaine addicts, to pay for an illegal war. Malpede edited the hearing transcript for length and clarity, but did not change a word of it. LAPD actors and others who play the twelve committee members and the CIA inspector general called to testify, are men and women who have been personally affected by illegal drugs and the “war” against them. Some have suffered addiction or incarceration. Speaking the words of hypocritical lawmakers who permit systemic abuse is their witness against their false sentiments.
“Agents & Assets” began its long run of performances during the uncertain post-presidential election period of 2000, touring many cities throughout the United States. The “second act” of the show is a discussion, led by a moderator and a couple of speakers, who relate current and/or local issues to the themes of the play. With different drug reform laws up for votes in various states, the show showed its political potency. But “Agents & Assets” also proved relevant in Europe – in England and Holland and Belgium – which suffer their own intransigent problems with drugs and drug laws.
Now, perhaps most explosively, the play, titled “Agentes y Activos” for Bolivian audiences, has come to a place where much cocaine originates. Relations between the United States and Bolivia have worsened in recent years. Bolivian President Evo Morales, the first indigenous leader of any South American country, has been for many years, and remains, the head of the federation of coca growers. The Bush administration accused Morales of failing to stem the tide of cocaine production and distribution. In turn, Morales accused the U.S. of meddling in Bolivian affairs, plotting with his political enemies to overthrow his government.
Both countries expelled each other’s ambassadors. The U.S. ended its preferential trade terms with Bolivia, citing the country’s lack of drug enforcement cooperation. In retaliation, Bolivia threw out U.S. government employees working in its territory: the DEA, AID and Peace Corps. Morales and some U.S. officials have expressed a cautious optimism that relations between the two countries may improve in the Obama era. But the Bolivian president has accused the United States of complicity in the Honduras military coup. Emotions remain raw and official relations, tense.
Into this edgy political environment, the Skid Row L.A. players have come to share the stage with some of their Bolivian counterparts, who have also suffered ill effects from the illegal drug trade and the official combat against it. Government officials and Bolivian media have shown strong interest in a project combining the efforts of Americans and Bolivians. Can ordinary citizens of both countries – using theater – define a common ground and create a more constructive dialog than their governments? After several weeks of rehearsals in Cochabamba, the play will tour the country, from LaPaz to Sucre to Santa Cruz.
John Malpede founded the LAPD (whose initials mock the police force who harassed many of their members) in 1985. A rising theater performer of national reputation, Malpede took a detour from personal stardom to share his theatrical knowledge with the homeless and formerly homeless denizens of Skid Row, the poorest section of Los Angeles. Branded as losers and welfare cheats by the Reagan administration, residents of Skid Row had no voice in their own destinies. Malpede empowered some of them with theatrical skills, enabling them to communicate their dilemmas to the “outside world.” Over decades the group has become increasingly articulate sophisticated, picking up information from other communities in the U.S. and beyond, making connections between poverty, globalization and militarization. They know how the drug war profits a few and victimizes many.
Malpede and the LAPD found congenial Bolivian artistic partners in Wiler Vidaurre and his wife, Zulma. Wiler and Zulma are professional actors on stage and in films. They run a school of “Artes y Talentos” in Cochabamba. Wiler and Zulma came to Malpede’s attention because of a theater program they have run in local prisons for the past eight years. Many of their prisoner performers have “graduated” to parole or to full liberty outside their jails, thanks in part to the rehabilitative aspects of their theater experiences.
The first night the group met, Wiler tried to explain the political reality here. Evo Morales is a polarizing figure, very popular in part of the country, but vilified in other parts. Wiler explained that when talking with the press, the Americans had to stress that their theater project was the product of independent artists, having nothing to do with the government. If “Agentes y Activos” is identified too closely with Evo’s policies, his many enemies – which include many media owners – would denounce the project out of hand, without considering its message or substance. This will be tricky, as the Ministry of Culture has offered some financial and logistical support.
It was important to John Malpede and Wiler Vidaurre to feature Bolivians playing the bureaucrats who – like their fellow players from L.A. – have felt the impact of the drug policies of their country. Wiler had a couple of actors in mind for parts in the play, but one of them was still on restricted parole, only allowed out of prison during the day to work. He had to return to his cell each night. Wiler appealed to a judge he knew from this prison work to let this actor rehearse in the evenings and travel when the group took the show in the road.
The judge, Yolanda, is responsible for supervising about 2000 prisoners in various stages of incarceration or parole. The judge decided to see the group for herself. She came to the first rehearsal, met the visiting gringo artists and talked with them about the play. Then Yolanda told them she had some theatrical training herself and asked if she too might join the cast. When she read the part of one of the more indignant members of the Congressional Committee – Millinder-McDonald of California – she found a sympathetic point of view. So the Bolivian “Agentes y Activos” will feature convicted drug offenders in its cast, as well as a judge who sentences and supervises them. In the many incarnations of the show this is a first.
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