Public i Contact

Managua, March 10, 2003 I sat and watched Claudia, a small pregnant woman of about twenty with two children at home. After asking how and why she had refused a large bribe from her former employer, Yu Jin, I realized the answer was obvious. Without hesitation, Claudia answered, “If we take the money, they will never recognize our dignity or our rights.”
Claudia is a member of the Nicaraguan labor movement who has spent the past four months struggling to regain her maquila job sewing clothes for American consumers. She and other workers were fired for attempting to organize a union. It was only once a campaign was begun to demand that the fired workers be rehired that Yu Jin, an apparel factory in the Saratoga Free Trade Zone, offered Claudia severance pay – an amount it would take her about nine months to earn. Claudia informed me, however, that there was no question in her mind about taking the money. She simply didn’t even take into consideration what an amount like that would mean to her.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
THE COST OF WORKING
Union busting is not an uncommon practice in Nicaragua, where maquilas (large, hot factories where line workers are under continual pressure to increase their output) employ about 60,000 people in a population of 5 million. Nor are workers who feel their human dignity violated rare.
Claudia told us that she and the other workers in her factory, almost all women, are often patted down when leaving the building, even though there would be no reason for them to steal pieces of cut fabric or other
materials. While most maquila workers are women, most guards are not.
I went to Managua as part of a Witness for Peace delegation with a group from United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) – I expected to hear stories like Claudia’s. After I spoke with Claudia, a twenty-two year-old member of my host family, Mary, told us about how she used to work 7 AM-9 PM Monday through Friday with only a thirty-minute lunch break and a fifteen-minute dinner break. She explained that her boss had often berated her as a caballa [horse], and that there was no soap or toilet paper supplied in the company bathrooms.
What I didn’t expect from my trip to Nicaragua was for such a clear picture to emerge. Although I learned many things about the grays of life in a “third world” country – not every maquila worker is poor, not every poor person is unhappy, many people do have high school or even college educations – I also learned how startlingly black and white international power dynamics can seem when viewed through the bottom-up lens.
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
THE LEGACY OF IMPERIALISM
Nicaragua has been struggling under the yoke of colonialism (now called “foreign intervention”) since the Spaniards invaded Central America in Columbus’s wake. In the past two centuries, though, the United States has been primarily responsible for enslaving Nicaragua in the service of Western capital.
In 1855, only thirty-four years after Nicaragua’s independence from Spain, an American named William Walker invaded Nicaragua and declared himself the head of state. It didn’t last long. In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. Marines occupied Nicaragua. And in the 1980s, as we all know, the U.S. government funded the Contra rebels in a war against the Sandinistas, the socialists who had driven U.S.-supported dictator Anastasio Somoza from power in 1979. The Contra war ended only in 1990, when Violeta Chamorro was elected president under heavy political pressure from the United States.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
THE REALITY OF IMPERIALISM
Currently, Nicaragua’s external debt totals U.S.$6.6 billion. Nicaragua’s annual GDP is only U.S.$2.15 billion. Nicaragua will pay $225 million this year just to service this debt, meaning that it will spend that amount of money simply in order to make the minimum interest payments necessary to borrow more money from institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.
Loans come with strings. Most IMF and World Bank loans are given only with coerced agreements from the recipient countries to implement structural adjustment policies or SAPs. The idea behind SAPs is that economists at the IMF are in a position to advise countries like Nicaragua on how to best use their loan money. Nicaragua must do its best to follow the SAPs in order to remain eligible for the next loan. In theory, it makes sense in a global economy to encourage fiscal responsibility in other countries. But who elected the economists at the IMF to be responsible for making Nicaragua’s budget decisions? Shouldn’t budget priorities be set by the citizens of a democratic nation? The budget writing process for 2003 is a good indicator of the relationship between SAPs, democracy, and the welfare of Nicaraguans. The Nicaraguan government will spend about 23% of its budget paying off old loans—the same amount that it will spend on education and health care combined.
After a draft of the 2003 budget had been approved by the IMF advisors, Nicaragua’s National Assembly increased the fiscal deficit spending in the budget by 1% of the 2003 GDP (gross domestic product) and expanded the government tax base.
Since the IMF had capped deficit spending in the budget at 6.3% of the GDP, and expansion of the tax base isn’t in the IMF development model, the IMF was unhappy with the increase and sent a delegation to Nicaragua. This delegation was widely interpreted as threatening the National Assembly with the withholding of future loans if the original, IMF-approved budget was not passed. The National Assembly, a democratically elected representative body, decided to pass the original budget set by the IMF instead of what Nicaraguans’ own officials thought was better for their country. SAPs are more than just spending priorities.They also mandate privatization of most, if not all, state-owned property.
According to neoliberal economists, state-run agencies are inefficient. But private companies, especially foreign ones, haven’t proven any more efficient from the perspective of the Nicaraguan people.
•••••••••••••••••
LIGHTS OUT?
Union Fenosa, the Spanish transnational company that bought Nicaragua’s national electric company has raised electricity rates drastically in order to increase the efficiency of the company. The raise was so drastic that many Nicaraguans (and some government agencies) can no longer afford to buy electricity.
For a family living on $600 Cordobas a month – minimum wage for policemen and teachers – electricity amounts to about 76% of their income. Furthermore, a private company has no incentive to provide electricity and services to those who are unlikely to pay the bill. According to Carlos Pacheco, a Nicaraguan economist, the situation got so out of hand that Union Fenosa cut the power to a branch of the Nicaraguan government that hadn’t paid its bill—the branch that is responsible for monitoring the seismic activity in the region.
Privatization encourages a government to sell the few assets it has. By selling the electric company, Nicaragua lost one of its most reliable sources of revenue, and many people lost their jobs as a result of the government’s attempt to make the company more saleable.
Even after these measures, the company was sold to Union Fenosa at rock bottom prices.
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••
ROB THE POOR TO FEED THE RICH
So why does the IMF keep encouraging privatization and other measures if they aren’t helping Nicaraguans? Because the policies aren’t intended to help Nicaraguans.
IMF policies are helping the countries whose investors are able to come into Nicaragua and make a fortune by selling utility services. They’re helping the international financial institutions get back some of their loan money by providing governments with quick cash. Most of all, they’re helping to ensure the world economic status quo.
In 1987, the World Court ruled that the United States owed Nicaragua $17 billion dollars in damages for mining Nicaragua’s harbors. The United States does not recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court, so it has never recognized that debt. U.S.-backed Chamorro agreed to abandon Nicaragua’s claim to the money in exchange for loans and other aid. So why does Nicaragua owe the United States and international financial institutions billions of dollars in aid spent trying to recover from the damage inflicted by a U.S. invasion in the 1920s, a U.S.-funded war in the 1980s, and policies imposed by U.S.-led institutions?
For more information, see Witness for Peace at www.witnessforpeace.org; Nicaragua Network at www.nicanet.org; and the Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua at www.wccnnica.org. If you are interested in things you can do, please contact me at meghan_krausch@hotmail.com.

Meghan is a grown-up who lives in Urbana. Likes: social justice, abortion, democracy. Dislikes: American hegemony, birds.

One thing that I remember of the Spanish people, when I was here 15 years ago as a young American study abroad student, was their attention to political matters. I never was part of one, but they seemed to have a lot of demonstrations; their news seemed to go a little deeper than the relentless parade of fires, shootings and tragedy I was used to in the U.S. It seems telling to me now that, due to the relative abundance of syllables present in the Spanish language, I referred to it as “talking like a machine gun”.
This time around I am a bit more integrated into things. I have been part of a demonstration, chanted the sad and stirring refrain, “No, no, guerra no, guerra no, guerra no (“No war,” basically), laughed at banners depicting Spanish President José María Aznar having anal sex with Tony Blair, who was doing the same to George W. Bush, and marvelled at the sheer number of people present. I especially felt a sort of wonder that so many children were singing slogans of peace, as well as senior citizens– but wasn’t a demonstration a dangerous thing? Not this one.
It was like a giant, sweet wave of peace. Peace combined with passion – and if any combination of factors can stop or slow the advance of greed, folly and violence now so painfully obvious to so many, it is that of peace and passion. Once, some friends (Spanish, German, French) and I interrupted our dinner to lean out of the balcony and bang on pots and pans, as did people all up and down the street. In the main plaza, the pot bangers were complimented by a host of candle-bearing citizens in the formation of a peace sign filling the large circular space. Others packed the surrounding streets that mark off the square with their own sea of candle light … I compare this stirring image with George Bush, Sr.’s smarmy “thousand points of light” speech.
Again last night, the people appeared in the streets and on balconies to bang pots. The noise of a whole city doing this is impressive, a bit like the sound of large hail raining down on car lots. Cars drive around honking, and even the fire fighters add their sirens to the din. It seems very childishly effective; the point, certainly, is made.
Yesterday a friend sent me an email as part of a campaign to flood the Popular Party’s computers with incoming protests, to literally paralyze their computer system with electronic complaints. I don’t know if it worked, but I sent mine.
There are hints of increased tensions, at least among the demographically singular adolescent crowd. Isolated incidents have been reported including the sacking of the one local McDonald’s and the egging of politicians and offices of President Aznar’s “Popular Party.”
The television images I see here are of some dead soldiers in American uniforms, interviews with captured Americans, squadrons of young Iraqi men on their knees with hands behind their heads in an attitude of surrender, and the unforgettable images of the bombing of Baghdad. The war is getting full coverage; the ecological and economic disaster of the oil spill in Northwestern Spain, which dominated the airwaves for two and a half months, is all but forgotten. The Oscars were covered with an eye toward how the actors and directors and other nominees would address the war – or not. One commentator expressed surprise that Pedro Almodóvar,who had participated in a protest march with Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, did not gainsay the war more strongly. The director himself, interviewed by the Spanish press, said that he felt afraid when he was there because the atmosphere was one of fear. I don’t know what has come out in the U.S. press, but here I have read about Aznar’s visits to the White House and to Bush’s Texas ranch and about how George W. praised Aznar’s efforts in the fight against “terrorism”. Now, the people here say that terrorism has been a horrible problem for them. And surely it has. However, recently the Spanish government shut down the only newspaper in Spain which was written in the Basque language, citing purported links of the publishers and editors to the terrorist organization ETA (the Basque separatist group). As it is, Basque is a language in danger of extinction, and a newspaper in that language an important voice for the integrity of those people.
I hate to say it, but for my part, I had to wonder if the close relations between the two governments of Spain and the United States had anything to do with Almodóvar’s winning his Oscar… and maybe I shouldn’t even suggest that, given that I saw neither his film nor any of his competitors’, but I follow the logic of a Spanish commentator who intimated that Chris Cooper, who apparently made some strong anti-war comments, might not win another Oscar, due to his choice of words. This commentator also noted the precedent of the blacklisting which occurred during the McCarthy era – Office of Homeland Security, anyone?
Someone here told me that they heard that seventy percent of the American people are reported to be in favor of the war against Iraq. They ask me if it is true. I don’t know what to tell them except that I hope not, and that if the source of this figure is the American press that it may be suspect. Many people here, rather naively in my opinion, wondered if the war would actually happen. I told them that the American Government, if it cared what the people thought, would be headed by Al Gore right now.
But, flowing along in a river of peaceful protestors, banging pots and brandishing candles to the night – it’s hard to believe that all these lovely gestures, as it were, would not have some positive effect.

Jim Kotowski spent junior year of college (’86-’87) in Barcelona as a student, and squandered his time in the company of other Americans, which is something one can easily do in Illinois. He is now fullfilling his vow to come back and “do it right”, teaching English and living Barcelona life in a more integrated fashion, looking forward to walking through Spain this summer via the Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage road that is still quite active today.

As the war in Iraq progresses, I feel the need to share with you, my friends and family, a little bit about what it feels like to live outside of the US during this frightening time.
Here in Guatemala, there has been a significant ongoing presence outside of the US Embassy vehemently opposed to the war. I went one day last week during lunch and someone threw red paint on me.
Car after car passing the rally honked their horns and showed their fists to the embassy, and a group of protesters burnt the US flag while the crowd cheered. In the US, such a turn out for a rally makes me hopeful and energized. Standing in front of my embassy here in Guatemala, however, watching my flag get burnt and thinking about all of you back home, all I felt was fear. It is true. They really hate us. More and more every day. It is amazing to me, the amount of public outcry that is going on right now throughout the world. People in Asia, in Africa, in Central and South America and throughout Europe have been marching in the streets and speaking out against the largest common enemy, and potential threat, the world has ever known.
Even in the conservative Guatemalan press, articles about the US empire needing to be stopped, the civilian casualties in Iraq and the arrogance of US foreign policy inundate the coverage of the war. Many Guatemalan journalists are very afraid not only of what this attack means to international security and respect for international law but of what it will do to the poorest nations in the world, whose economies catch pneumonia when the US economy sneezes.
CNN, which some friends of mine have here, seems to have become the official station of the US Department of Defense. I hear terms like “Operation Freedom for Iraq” and laugh. “Who is buying any of this?” I ask. And then I realize, 80% of my fellow Americans (I’m told). I want to think that it isn’t their fault and that they are being lied to, but I wonder how much they want to believe what they hear. I know that if they used the tools available to them – their educated minds, the internet, compassion – it wouldn’t be this way.
I read last week that Bush has signed an executive order that makes it easier for government agencies, including the White House, to keep documents classified and out of public view. From the NY Times: “The order delays by three years the release of declassified government documents dating from 1978 or earlier and treats all material sent to American officials from foreign governments — no matter how routine –as subject to classification. It expands the ability of the Central Intelligence Agency to shield documents from declassification. And for the first time, it gives the vice president the power to classify information.” The Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org) apparently obtained a draft version of the second Patriot Act, which makes all information gathering, including research, a possible “weapon of mass destruction” and considers any criminal a “terrorist,” eligible for deportation, even if you are a natural born citizen. I read reports circulating in activist circles of artists and organizers being visited by plain-clothed government officials and being asked questions and warned that they should stop their subversive activities. A man in Washington was arrested in a mall two weeks ago for wearing a t-shirt that read, “Give Peace a Chance.” I feel that these acts are the acts of a frightened emperor, who can see the imminent crumbling of his empire.
I worry for my country and I worry for the American people. I hope that none of you forget that there is nothing more American than dissidence and that if you do not exercise your rights, you will, indeed, have them taken away from you.
Peace,
Jessica

For the past half-decade Thailand’s Pak Mun Dam has been recognized by environmental and human rights groups as a posterchild of insensitive, inequitable, top-down development strategy. Despite civil society’s criticism, however, thousands of local villagers still squat in a makeshift, shantytown protest village only yards from the dam. They eat, sleep and commune in protest of the dam that has stolen their own livelihoods, their families’ food source and their children’s playground. Still today their demands to permanently decommission the dam, restore the river ecology and revitalize community health remain unmet.

I recently had the opportunity to study about, work for, and live with this group of dispossessed villagers.

HISTORY
Pak Mun Dam is situated 5.5 kilometers upstream from the confluence of the Mun and the Mekong Rivers. Above the dam, the Mun’s waters are fed by a basin three times the size of the Netherlands.
Because of such an expansive ecological base, environmental groups and biologists were concerned how the dam would affect migratory fish from the Mekong, one of the planet’s most diverse waterways. Doctors raised the issue of schistosomiasis, a deadly worm that resides in stagnant water. Human rights organizations questioned how resettlement and compensation plans could prove effective if no topographical map of water level was released. Civil society fumed at the lack of participatory process, as countless villagers were told of their soon-to-be neighbor. After all, villagers had never requested the electricity or irrigation the dam was to provide.

In 1990 the resolution to build the Pak Mun Dam passed the Thai parliament. The only environmental and social impact assessment performed for this project was completed seven years before. The study assessed a dam of different proportions than what was actually built and assumed it to be several kilometers downstream from its eventual site. Despite several dramatic displays of protest, including villagers strapping themselves to rocks slated for explosive removal, the project barreled forward. A thirteen percent budgetary boost from the World Bank buoyed the monster, and in 1994, voila, a dam was born.

IN HINDSIGHT
Eight years later, it’s apparent the only factor keeping the dam in place is a fear of losing political face. It can safely be said, the project has been a failure on all fronts; project costs nearly doubled, ballooning from an expected 3.88 billion Baht to and eventual 6.6 billion. Power generation, estimated at 136 MW in the project proposal, barely scratches 21 MW, enough to power one Wal-Mart. Irrigation is non-existent. And tourism, the Thailand fallback? Well, remember that shantytown protest village? That’s positioned on the ‘scenic overlook.’ Even more unfortunate have been the effects unforeseen, at least by the government and the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT). According to the 1998 World Bank Operation and Evaluation Report, fish catch and income decreased by 50% from 1994. A study by the Thai NGO, Project for Ecological Recovery, found upwards of 75% reductions in incomes only a year later.. Vegetation has been destroyed. The dry-season riverbank, usually a fertile area for local agriculture, is inundated year-round.

Mitigation efforts have proved obsolete. A fish ladder, unwisely modeled after the designs of the Columbia River and customized for the sleek-swimming Pacific Northwest Salmon has, not surprisingly, flopped. Said Dr. Pladprasop Suraswasdi, former director of the Royal Fisheries Department, “We know nothing about the pattern and behavior of fish migration.” Prawns were introduced to the reservoir in hopes of reviving local fishing incomes but are unable to reproduce. Local, small-scale, subsistence fisherman, accustomed to the shallow rapids, have no equipment for the style of fishing the reservoir necessitates. Communities and families have suffered the brunt of the load, as children and women have been forced to seek low-pay work in Bangkok.

The final judgment broke when the World Commission on Dams (WCD), a panel of NGOs, businessmen, politicians and engineers assembled by the World Bank, deemed Pak Mun a tragedy. Their case study of Pak Mun, released in 2000, states, “If all the benefits and costs were adequately assessed, it is unlikely that the project would have been built.”

DAMN DAMS
Pak Mun is a textbook example of development projects that lack necessity and, for most persons, desirability. Large dam projects are especially prone to this tendency. Together with the WCD report, Patrick McCully’s “Silenced Rivers” throws light on the inequities and drawbacks of dams which usually go unreported. Most often a dam is built, then justified, not vice versa. Those that lose out are those most dependent on and responsible for a healthy local environment: poorly represented, traditional communities. Those that win are transnational corporations, which are brought in for construction, financing and consulting. These companies benefit most from surplus electricity and suffer least from heightened water costs. After large chunks of profit and benefits flow over the border, what’s left is a dam that typically fails to meet expected benefits and exceeds expected costs.

The global anti-dam movement reflects a growing sentiment among many human rights and earth rights organizations who have watched this pattern repeat itself again and again in the South. Supported by NGOs such as the International Rivers Network and by committed political activists such as Arundhati Roy in India, local communities in the South are able to further strengthen their fight.

HOW MANY MILES MUST WE MARCH?
Twelve years after a handful of villagers strapped themselves to the rivers’ rocks, the protestor’s resolve has remained undeterred. Pak Mun villagers have joined forces with other dispossessed of Thailand to create the Assembly of the Poor, a large people’s organization that has limited but undeniable influence in national politics. They have organized a 2,000-mile protest march and raised more than ten protest villages throughout the nation including one in front of Bangkok’s Government House. In 2001 they were successful in lobbying the government to open the eight sluice gates of the dam in order to perform studies on the natural river ecology and the communities it supports. Released last month, this study notes the social and ecological damage far outweighs the benefits from electricity. Moreover, it illustrates the communities’ and ecosystem’s regenerative ability. Regardless, the Thai government is threatening to once again ignore the plight of villagers and reasoning of academics. Surely, as long as Thailand’s powerful continue to take their cues from Western political, economic and corporate paradigms, the villagers’ fight to stay afloat will still remain.

A video and in-depth presentation regarding the Pak Mun Dam was be held Thursday, November 7th at 7pm at the Illinois Disciples Foundation, 610 E. Springfield Ave, Champaign. Opportunities for attendees to write and sign letters followed the presentation.

Joe Rupp is a student at the U of I majoring in Agriculture and Consumer Economics with a focus on International Trade, Policy and Development. This past year he spent over seven months in Thailand, first as a student and then as an informal correspondent between the study abroad program, the villagers of Pak Mun and several local and international NGOs. Joe says the experience really lit a fire inside him: “Thailand not only exposed me to a different way of life, culturally, economically and politically, it also clearly showed me the connection between them and us, the United States and the rest of the world. You can’t understand that and not want to do anything.”

On the drive from the Johannesburg airport to the wealthy white suburb of Sandton – host to the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development, the largest international conference ever – colorful billboards cajole Summit delegates to taste and enjoy the city’s tap water, boasting that it is as pure and clean as bottled water. Suspended above the airport freeway, Black township boys splash joyfully in an endless bath of fresh blue tap water. Unlike bottled water, the messages imply that Jo’burg’s water is free, clean, and for all to enjoy.

Yet, after a few days of swimming through murky Summit politics, one learns that these omnipresent billboards were not purchased to assuage the fears of European delegates that African tap water is unsafe. Rather, the ANC-led, post-Apartheid South Africa has been busy packaging all of its public goods – water, electricity, sanitation, health services, transport systems – for sale to any willing buyer. From billboards to policy statements to business transactions, the message of the World Summit was loud and clear: Welcome to South Africa, where Everything is for Sale. Of the 60,000 Summit attendees, many were in town to buy (i.e., bargain-hunting large firms), sell (i.e., cash-strapped Southern governments), or mediate (i.e., entrepreneurial NGOs) these deals.

Only ten kilometers down the road, in classic Apartheid-like geography, the rigidly segregated and decrepit township of Alexandra (“Alex”) houses Sandton’s underemployed labor force. Without good public transportation, health clinics, schools, or basic public services, Alex stands as a grim reminder of all that has not changed since liberation. Three hundred thousand people in Alex are packed into just over two square miles of land without access to affordable clean water, electricity, safe housing, or basic sanitation services. The key word is “affordable,” as many of these services have been provided but have now been shut off because people cannot afford to pay for them. In a dramatic political U-turn, the new politics of the post-liberation African National Congress (ANC) is one that conforms to the Washington consensus’ view of the market as “willing buyer, willing seller,” which has been imposed on poor (Black) South Africans in the most draconian fashion.

Today, South Africa is still reeling from a deadly cholera outbreak that erupted from the worst wave of government-enforced water and electricity cut-offs. At the outset of the epidemic, which has infected more than 140,000 people, the government cut off one thousand people’s (previously free) water supply in the rural Zululands for lack of a $7 reconnection fee. In addition, 43,000 children die yearly from diarrhea, a function of limited or no water and sanitation services. The Wits University Municipal Services Project ( http://www.queensu.ca/msp) conducted a national study last year that identified more than ten million out of South Africa’s forty-four million residents who had experienced water and electricity cutoffs. Epidemiologists say that these cutoffs were the catalysts to the national cholera crisis.

Township activists have struck back by forming by day the Soweto Electricity Crisis Committee (SECC) of the Anti-Privatization Forum (APF), the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign, and the Concerned Citizens’ Forum in Durban and working by night with stealth teams re-connecting homes before dawn (“Operation Khanyisa”, as it is called in Soweto, which the ANC has called the new “criminal culture” of the townships). When a stealth team disconnected the Jo’burg’s mayor’s home from electricity in April, they were met with live ammunition and arrest, spending eleven days in the notorious Apartheid Diepkloof prison without a bail hearing.

What’s all this have to do with the World Summit on Sustainable Development? The changes occurring in the workers’ townships were mirrored in the agenda of this international forum. As a follow-up to the momentous Rio Earth Summit in 1992, the Jo’burg Summit’s mission was to assess the accomplishments and failures of the past ten years, and to agree upon a program of what should be accomplished over the next decade. The agenda emphasized five basic issues (or goods): Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture, and Biodiversity. After a series of preparatory committee meetings were held on each continent, with government officials, staff from major intergovernmental agencies, international environmental organizations, and respondents to “open” invitations to all members of so-called civil society, the agenda and its main policy document read like both a World Bank policy paper and a wish list for the world’s largest service sector firms (e.g., Vivendi, Suez, Saur, Bechtel, RWE/Thames Water). These firms, meanwhile, have spent these last few years signing large contracts with Southern governments to manage the basic public goods that can often make the difference between life and death for the poor majority.

The most prevalent actors at the Summit were the World Bank and the IMF, and their “environmental agenda” has become unambigously neoliberal. Their water policy, for example, has become a new condition for future financing and debt relief. The threat is that the capital spigots will be shut off for those governments refusing to consider privatizing their water services. As overwhelming debt has toppled governments and created dire social conditions such as poverty and the present famine in southern Africa, and as populist movements demand that their governments stop servicing these odious and unjust debts, the Bank and IMF are using the lever of debt relief to force water policy reform on borrowing-country governments. Hence, privatization has become much more than a policy that economically benefits a few transnational firms; it also increases the political roles of international finance institutions and transnational firms in the global South. Thanks to the Bank’s arm-twisting, indebted governments are allowing Northern firms to become institutionally embedded in the everyday lifeworlds of the people of the South: Northern firms now provide the people’s water, power, health care, and garbage pick-up, and firms now even send them a consolidated bill to collect their money. It is to these firms that one must go if one needs basic goods for household survival.

Reading the Summit Script
The rise of this World Bank-style green neoliberal politics can be clearly read in the script of the 2002 Jo’burg World Summit. On one level, the storyline typical of these international forums remains the same: unenforceable targets, goals, heartless steamrolling by the U.S., and last-minute heroics by a few fearless Southerners. The defensive World Bank generates press releases that decry Europe and the U.S. for their huge subsidies for agribusiness; a Bank vice president even apologizes for the Bank’s role in the famine in southern Africa, by forcing highly indebted countries to eliminate subsidies to their farmers who could not afford the inputs to produce this season. Perhaps millions will starve as a consequence. The Bank’s presence can also be felt in the final agreements of the Summit. The official negotiations concluded like this: Under the category of water, government leaders agreed to halve by 2015 the number of people – now an estimated 2.4 billion – who live without basic water and sanitation (a guideline doggedly opposed by the U.S.). Under the category of energy, the U.S. and OPEC would not allow targets to pass for renewable energy, especially the Brazilian proposal endorsed by most countries to quadruple the world’s use of clean energy by 2010. The EU pushed a more modest plan for a 1 per cent increase over the next decade.

Under the category of agriculture and fishing, the World Bank’s Global Environmental Facility (GEF) was given the authority to fight against desertification and to rebuild fish stocks “where possible” by 2015, all in very vague language that critics argue may undermine existing and more concrete agreements. U.S. and European delegates refused to phase out their own agricultural subsidies, support organics, or restrict genetically modified crops. Under the category of biodiversity, the Summit took a big step backwards in watering down existing wording to “stop and reverse the current alarming biodiversity loss” to language that could satisfy the U.S. The big news was under the unexpected category of corporate accountability: Due to a well-constructed campaign by North-South pressure groups, governments accepted that binding rules could be developed to govern the behavior of multinational companies, language which the U.S vigorously fought, even after the agreement had been signed. No timetable, however, was set for such negotiations.

Finally, there remain the two most significant elements to the official World Summit. One was the “consensus” or the widespread acceptance by NGOs, foundations, governments, intergovernmental organizations, and of course corporations, of the mechanism of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) or the leasing of traditionally public services to private firms and the circumventing of international agreements and agencies that have often mediated between strong firms and weak states. In other words, as a complement to UN Secretary General Kofi Anan’s Global Compact with firms, no longer are the transnational corporations the silent partner and discrete beneficiary of the “world of development”; now, they become the legitimized main driver. The second, equally as pernicious, is the agreement to give the World Trade Organization (WTO), which seeks to eliminate all obstacles to “free trade,” the power to override international environment agreements. This marks the re-ascendancy of the WTO when some thought, post-Seattle, that the hubristic WTO was withering away.

Cracks in Summit coalitions, however, showed during some decidedly anti-Summit events in town. Jo’burg was jammed with large public forums on land reform; on privatization of water and electricity; on fisheries and the rapidly decreasing access to fish resources by fishing communities; on evictions and poor housing conditions; on World Bank boycott campaigns; and on environmental issues such as GMO foods and nuclear power. Across the board, southern African-based groups were busy organizing across national borders throughout southern Africa, but also more widely as they brought together movement leaders from Brazil, India, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Mexico, and more.

On the day the heads of state arrived to sign the World Summit’s final agreement, 20,000-30,000 marchers took to the streets under the banners of “Africa is Not For Sale” and “Phansi W$$D, Phansi!” (the Zulu command for “away with!” plus the initials of the World Summit). It was the first show of independent-left opposition since the ANC took power, and it reflected not just a politics of anti-ANC but a politics of anti-neoliberalism from around the world. From Bolivia to Ghana to Hungary, people’s movements are responding. In Jo’burg last month, perhaps we saw a glimpse of what’s to come, with tens of thousands of people organizing to resist what is officially called “sustainable development,” but is unambiguously a greened-over neoliberalism that has captured indebted Southern governments with few options but to comply.

Michael Goldman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the U of I, came here four years ago from Berkeley, CA and is currently teaching Transnational and Environmental Sociology. He is involved with an international network of scholars and activists educating people on the role of the World Bank and IMF in the global economy and in people’s lives. His books include Privatizing Nature: Political Struggles for the Global Commons and the soon to be completed Imperial Nature: The New Politics and Science of the World Bank.

Dear Friends and Family,

It has been a while since I have had the chance to write. A lot has been going on down here and with me personally and I haven’t had much opportunity to sit at a computer much less organize my thoughts. Most significant, however, I should tell you before continuing that 500,000 communion wafers turned out to NOT BE ENOUGH during Pope John Paul’s visit to Guatemala City recently. Can you believe it? Guatemalans everywhere found themselves embarrassed and disillusioned and without a communion wafer. As if being found guilty of genocide in the Spanish courts a couple months ago weren’t enough.

THE TRIAL (if you can call it that)
“If we don’t stop and change direction, we will end up where we are heading.” -Chinese proverb

After a series of cancelled dates, failed appeals and enough 3am departures out of Xamán to make a good girl turn bad, the trial has been transferred to a new, yet-to-be-created court in the Ixcán region. Since the municipal center of the Ixcán is actually closer to community, this would have been a good thing — if only the trial weren’t almost over and it weren’t logistically impossible for the lawyer (from the capital) to make it up there on last minute notice. The lawyer for the community, has of course appealed the transfer. However, the appeal cannot be received by the judge due to the fact that there are no court personnel as of yet in the Ixcán (details!) not to mention public defenders, a jail for suspects, or any of the other pleasantries of a functioning justice system. Estella recently sent a new appeal to the Supreme Court of Guatemala and we currently await the hearing. Estella says that if the transfer goes through, it will be another three years – at least – before the process begins again, and what amazing feats of incompetence the court will come up with at that point remains to be seen. Of course, many believe that what appears to be incompetence is actually a very efficient method of keeping justice from ever being won. Same thing, really.

FAR FROM HOME
In a climate specifically manipulated to instill fear and insecurity, it is often hard to discern what is real and what is your mind (or the mind of your neighbor) screwing with you. In June and July, there were three separate reports of armed, masked men seen either on the outskirts of Xamán or inside the community. In the midst of these alleged sightings and their accompanying mayhem, an unidentified man was chased away from my window late one night. I do not know if he was a peeping tom (or part of a more sinister plot!) but I can say that I did find his presence quite disturbing.

Meanwhile, more unequivocal threats and acts of intimidation directed towards human rights defenders in the capital have been on the rise. On the morning of July 5, Estella, the lawyer for the community, was attacked as she walked from her car to her office building. She fought back, escaping only after a significant struggle. I visited with her just yesterday and there was still a huge scar on her throat where her attacker’s nails dug in as he attempted to strangle the life out of her. Since that incident, she has been followed and intimidated on various occasions. In late July, the offices of the only two other international accompaniment organizations working in Guatemala City were broken into and their computers were stolen.

LOGIC
Spain recently decided that while they do consider what went on in Guatemala in the early 1980s to be an act of attempted Genocide, they feel that it is within the jurisdiction of the Guatemalan government to deal accordingly with this crime. Unfortunately, since the same man who was President during these atrocities is now the head of Congress, no one in Guatemala truly believes that that will be happening any time soon.

Meanwhile, back in the US of A, in July, 29 US citizens were sentenced to 3 to 6 months for participating in a peaceful protest in Fort Benning, Georgia, the site of the infamous School of the Americas (SOA). A training center for Central American military officers, the SOA was where many Guatemalan military personnel were trained in counter-insurgency (including torture) techniques in the early 1980s, during the attempted genocide (according to not only Spain but also the UN’s Truth Commission Report on Guatemala). While impunity reigns for these crimes against humanity, a group of peaceful demonstrators, many of them nuns, will now serve hard time in a federal prison for holding a demonstration in the Middle of Nowhere, Georgia. Sixty-four year old Sister Kathleen Desautels went on record to say “The indignities I will have to experience in prison pale in comparison to what the victims of the graduates of that school had to endure.” She and her fellow activists wore T-shirts proclaiming “You can jail the resistors but you cannot jail the resistance” to their hearing. They have no intention of shutting up now.

ME VS. NATURE
I got the flu a couple months ago, followed by a 2 kinds of parasites, amoebas in various stages of development, and even worms. Yes, that was worms. In my stomach. The medicine for this “parque zoologico,” as the doctor called it (he fathomed himself quite the funny man), was rough on my system and weakened all natural defenses, making me susceptible to a second round of animalitos, which also had to be blasted out with heavy drugs. A couple weeks later, I had my first scorpion bite and about a week after that, I acquired a strange foot infection (from bathing in dirty stream water with an cut on my ankle) which swelled up my foot to twice its normal size and hurt like hell, making it nearly impossible to get around.

I am feeling better now and I have no intention of not eating, walking or bathing. I will not give up my struggle. ADIOS

As I prepare to close another chapter in my sordid history with Guatemala, I am questioning my purpose here and honestly, I don’t know if you can sense it from my letter, but I am feeling a bit dejected. I have dedicated the past year of my life to helping a community of returned refugees in Guatemala feel more secure and so that they can pursue justice. As I look over my shoulder on my way out of the country, I see that they neither feel secure nor have they gotten any closer to any reparations for or acknowledgment of their losses. They are still dirt poor, without any clinic, running water or electricity, afraid of the army and afraid to pursue the extremely flawed channels that exist for them to pursue justice. They are without any real means of changing their reality. I am not sure that this case will endure the obstacles and fear that it has been so very riddled with. I am realizing how much determination there is in Guatemala to keep it’s history buried deep in the earth with the clandestine graves of the poor and indigenous masses that line the countryside and the ruins of their ancestors triumphs from days long gone by. I am angry that anyone who wants to work their way towards uncovering the truth will inevitably endure many more years of fear and suffering before they ever see the fruits of their efforts – that is if their efforts ever reach fruition. I am angry that such blatant impunity is tolerated not only within Guatemala but in the international community. I am angry that the army continues to win every day as more and more people walk away from the struggle. I am angry that businessmen and politicians up north are getting rich off of it. I am angry that people who work for justice end up getting so screwed. I try not to let myself sink too deep into this well of despondency, however, and continually remind myself that if we don’t continue working to uncover the truth, we allow the impunity, repression
and disparity to flourish. The only thing worse than living in a world so ugly and so unfair is living in a world without hope. My friend and personal guru Goyo tells me that “if you expect to see the results of your work, you are not asking big enough questions.” I have a lot to learn about patience.

One week ago, I reluctantly said goodbye to the community of Xamán, assuring them that the next accompanier is on her way (I didn’t make that up) and that I will be back soon for a visit. I have accepted a position with Rights Action, a Canadian organization working throughout Central America, and I will begin working with them in October as an investigative reporter, more or less. I will be covering various issues surrounding the peace process in Guatemala as well as Natural Resources and Land Sovereignty Issues throughout Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala and Chiapas. However, before I dive into that project, I am going to come home for a month or two to take a breather, catch up with y’all and attend the wedding of the lovely Miss Bonnie Boecker. So, I hope to see you soon. Until then, take care.

Jessica

Jessica Pupovac is a committed human rights activist, a dancer and a Karaoke Queen. As a student she founded the University of Illinois chapter of the Students for a Free Tibet. She graduated from U of I in 1999 and left Champaign-Urbana in 2001 to become a human rights monitor/accompanier with the Network in Solidarity with the People of Guatemala (www.nisgua.org). As an accompanier, she spent one year living in the community of Xamán – a rural, indigenous community of returned refugees and the site of the 1995 Xamán massacre.There, she provided a degree of security to the community by bearing witness, attempting to raise awareness of their struggle in the international community and traveling with community members to trial.

She currently resides in Guatemala City, where she works with a Canadian NGO, Rights Action.

Her letters have appeared in the Public i and the paper formerly known as the Octopus, as well as various solidarity newsletters throughout the US.