Tag Archives: social justice

La Primavera Mexicana

25 May

I spent most of the month of April in Mexico waiting for something interesting to happen that I could write about in The Global Kiosk. I chatted about the upcoming elections with cab drivers, hairdressers, friends and neighbours, and everyone said more or less the same thing: that they were not going to vote for the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s Enrique Peña Nieto, but that he would undoubtedly win. Early surveys – the election is July 1 – also put him 20 points ahead of the next candidate down for the race to the presidency.

Then, in May, I come to Haiti – and interesting things start bubble up in Mexico. A bit of a kerfuffle for Peña Nieto at an elite university, the Ibero Americana. Okay. Maybe a bit of an embarrassment for a man who disdains education and use of the brain in decision-making, but no big deal. The young people shouting “Out Peña Nieto” were but a rabble-esque minority, said his campaign people and the self-styled pundits at the country’s main television news provider, Televisa. Let’s get on with our taking over the country again.

Then, as I say, the reactions started to bubble up, and seep into the national conscience. The tech-savvy Ibero students began to counter the image invented for them by the PRI and their wealthy mouthpieces at Televisa. They began to put out the real story on Twitter and Facebook and even made a short film – 131 Students of the Ibero Respond – that got more than 1.2 million views within a week.

Then the street protests began, with student marches in more than 20 cities on the 19th. Another big demonstration in the Zocalo of Mexico City the following day organized by the PRD contender, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador – a candidate whom the students were clear about indicating they wouldn’t necessarily back. And then another big anti-establishment – for lack of a better word – demonstration last Thursday night.

Suddenly we are paying attention.

And the details to which we are paying attention are interesting: as a new article by my husband, Luis Porter, in U2000 points out, if the original rejection of Peña Nieto had occurred at the country’s largest public university, the UNAM, it would have died on the spot. People expect that kind of thing from the leftist hotbed it is supposed to be.

But the kids at the Ibero are the children of Mexico’s ambitious middle and upper classes. They study hard, work hard and want to succeed in life. (In every issue of business magazine Expansion’s annual list of the nation’s top entrepreneurs, almost everyone is an Ibero grad.) They aren’t used to being shoved to the sidelines with the suggestion they don’t know what they’re talking about or have been bought off by Peña Nieto’s opponents.

But it is now clear that this sense of youthful indignation is not confined to students whose parents can afford to send them to a private university. It is being felt by young people all over the country. They all want their vote to mean something. They are all fed up with being told what to think by a media empire (and how the on-going Rupert Murdoch saga now springs to mind as well) that trades in cheap sentiment and biased reporting in lieu of informing a populace so that it can make its own decisions. They are not buying the soap opera narrative of the young, good-looking politician with the actress wife and lovely family returning the country to the stability of days gone by.

In fact, there is much about the protests that remind me of the Occupy movement. Somewhat like Occupy’s “We are the 99%,” the movement in Mexico is calling itself “I am #132,” each protestor adding him or herself to the original group that pointed out that they had the right to voice an opinion, to demand more than good looks and mega-corporate backing as qualifications to run their country.

They’re not telling anyone who they should vote for, or even who they will vote for, only that times have changed. That they represent a new generation of Mexicans that has gone outside the traditional media to inform themselves, and that they care about the direction their country is going.

And it’s pretty clear that they don’t want a society where illegal immigration is the normal response to low wages or unemployment, where monopolies and duopolies hog economic activity, and public spending is a till filled with the many hands of the corrupt. They don’t want to be told that the July 1 election is already, as so often in the past, a fait accompli.

They are so far the sole indication that business as usual, whether by the dinosaurs of the PRI or any self-interested politician, is standing on ever more fragile legs in Mexico right now.

Is this the sign of  a Mexican Spring? We don’t know yet. But the power of mobilization the youth of Mexico have brought into play is, I think, something no one is going to denigrate, or forget, anytime soon.

Check the Fine Print

20 Feb

A couple of weeks ago, the official American aid giant USAID announced that, at long last, it was going to allow non-US firms to bid on development contracts, potentially opening up its vast reserves of cash to companies actually based in the poor countries these are supposed to help.

This caught my attention, because in two books that explore and criticize the workings of the aid industry — or certainly aspects of it — USAID comes in for a fair share of the flack.

In Travesty in Haiti: a true account of Christian missions, orphanages, fraud, food aid and drug trafficking, anthropologist Tim Schwartz looked at the harmful effects of CARE’s food program in Haiti, part of which consisted of selling American (and Canadian)-grown grain and other foodstuffs on the open market.

Why was a charity engaging in commerce, and competing with poor farmers trying to sell their grains and produce? Well, instead of giving CARE, let’s say, a million dollars to spend on projects, USAID gave it something to sell instead and to earn those million dollars that way. Tim Schwartz — and many others — pointed out the immense harm created by the practice, but it took many years for the charitable organization to finally stop doing this. And according to CARE Haiti’s Yves-Laurent Regis, when it finally did, the resulting reduction in funds saw the firing of over 500 staff members.  (Some of their programs were offloaded to the UN’s World Food Program, and I can only guess from where it is getting its food, but I am assuming most, if not all, of it isn’t locally procured.)

Now I am reading Michael Maren’s The Road to Hell: the ravaging effects of foreign aid and international charity. In it, Maren looks at the play of circumstances unleashed by USAID’s supplying of US-grown food in Somalia in the 1980s. Here too, this influx of grains destabilized and gutted the local agricultural economy, sending peasant farmers into a deepening spiral of penury. How? Working as a food relief monitor, Maren writes, “After checking ledgers at refugee camps, I figured that most of the relief food being sent to the region –probably about two-thirds — was being stolen. Some disappeared from the docks in Mogadishu. Some disappeared from the trucks along the way to the camps. Sometimes entire trucks would leave the port and vanish forever. Most of it, it seemed, disappeared from the camps, sold by camp commanders, who were usually Somali military men, or were taken by … members of the Western Somalia Liberation Front. Along with the food, the WSLF also raided camps for able-bodied young men, unwilling conscripts for their murky guerilla war across the Ethiopian border in the Ogaden desert.”

For Maren, it was all part of complex political strategy on the part of Somalia’s dictator-president Siyaad Barre, to take over the piece of neighbouring Ethiopia inhabited by ethnic Somalis.

Even so, there was so much food being delivered to the camps that the refugees themselves — their numbers hugely inflated so that Siyaad Barre could access ever-larger amounts of it  — were selling the surplus. “We were getting too much food, so we would take it and sell it to buy soap and cloth and kerosene, a refugee named Aden Farah told Maren. “Several refugees opened shops …  and started selling the food. It was cheap, so the people were buying it. And it was cheaper than in Mogadishu, so merchants from the city came to buy the food.”

So the idea that USAID might buy food locally would be a welcome change, right? But unfortunately, the new policy rules are not quite as revolutionary as one might think and, according to the Guardian, “do not extend to US-funded food aid. Under federal law, the vast majority of American food aid must be bought from US suppliers and transported on US ships.” (This also makes the aid fair more expensive for the U.S. tax-payer.)

What’s more, as if such potential good news were being completely disemboweled in the regulatory fine print, food isn’t the only exemption. Motor vehicles and pharmaceuticals must also be purchased from American firms.

In other words, one of the biggest problems caused — as opposed to solutions offered — by USAID remains unchanged and as wrongheaded as ever.

Why I Don’t Believe the Mexican Government is Serious About Combatting Drug Violence

26 Oct

June, 2010
It was early summer and Mexico City bathed in the sweltering heat of a dry season stubbornly refusing to give way to the rains. Even as the number of deaths from the government’s struggle against organized crime reached past 23,000, even as one of the nation’s most powerful men — former presidential candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos — was kidnapped, life went on in the vast metropolis and in towns and cities across the country. It was as if an alternate reality, a webbing of uncontrollable criminality, lurked below the surface of daily life.
It’s a reality to which Mexicans, appalled as they may be, are becoming accustomed.
“It’s not like you’re fearful just walking down the street,” said John Mills Ackerman, law professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, “but if you’re targeted by a drug cartel there’s really nothing you can do. And this,” he added, “is an inheritance of the authoritarian system of government. This has been the big problem of the democratic transition of the last 10 years. We are still working with the same state apparatus, the same institutions. The changing colours of the party has led to different groups or mafias coming in or out of government—but not to a real conquest of formal institutions over informal institutions.”
Mexicans who have for one reason or another fallen afoul of what Ackerman called “powerful informal actors” should be seeking protection from the federal Attorney General, or PGR. Its Ministerio Publico, or Public Prosecutors Office, has the job of not only investigating crimes, but deciding which cases will be prosecuted. “The Ministerio Publico is in total control of every part of criminal proceedings,” said Ackerman.
Yet while the 2000 ouster of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, from government may have cracked open the political system, the judiciary remains mired in a culture of favouritism, secrecy and corruption.
Judges rarely question or even see defendants during trial. There are no juries, no oral arguments, and no public access to evidence until the trial is over. Evidence gathered under torture is admissible, and most suspects are found guilty without scientific proof like fingerprints or DNA. In this system, prosecutors have unusually broad powers, deciding if a suspect is guilty before their day in court and using their own police force to gather evidence to support those decisions.
For Jose Rosario Pacheco of the non-governmental Miguel Agustin Pro Juarez Human Rights Centre, the probability of such a system offering protection is “almost zero. There are many inequalities in Mexican society,” he said “and those same inequalities reproduce themselves in the justice system.”
What’s more, Mexican law does not allow people from one state to accuse anyone of so-called ‘common’ crimes like extortion, threats, kidnapping or even murder in another. To seek justice, victims must stay within the jurisdiction where crime has occurred, putting themselves in even greater danger. And, said Ackerman, “that’s not going to happen because the person knows the Ministerio Publico itself is, if not totally corrupt, that at least a criminal gang will have eyes and ears there. They’re going to see who is actually charging them. So there’s a very strong disincentive to even accuse these people.”
The entire apparatus allows organized crime to flourish. “Most Mexicans,” said Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and an expert on organized crime, “consider the judicial system corrupt at all levels. By being conceived as corrupt by society, people do not report crimes, do not collaborate with the authorities and therefore any effort of the state is hampered.”
Originally trained by the Mexican army in the 1990s as an elite, crime-fighting squad, the Zetas were soon co-opted by Osiel Cardenas, leader of the Gulf Cartel. When Cardenas was captured, “they slowly became more and more independent in many of their operations,” said Buscaglia, “at first with kidnappings, later extortions. And at some point they acquired so much economic power that they were able to divorce themselves from the Gulf Cartel.”
By now, he said, they are much more than a drug-trafficking gang. “They are a transnational organized crime group involved in 17 types of crimes, and present in 23 countries around the world.” Branching out into weapons and human trafficking, along with contract killings, protection rackets and the kind of small yet profitable business of forcing non-members to retail drugs, “they have made fortunes out of this huge diversification,” he said.
Their financial clout and violent methods have allowed the Zetas to infiltrate police and judicial systems in several states, including Chiapas and Oaxaca. Infiltrating the federal government has been more of a challenge for them, said Buscaglia, but that’s only because their main rival, the Sinaloa Cartel, “has had a long-term monopoly on the capture of federal authorities at the highest level.”
There are 982 “pockets” in Mexico, where “the authorities and organized crime are one force,” Buscaglia added, “and that’s the essence of a failed state. Mexico is facing limited symptoms of a failed state—and it’s expanding.”
Although President Felipe Calderon has continually proclaimed his desire to vanquish organized crime, dispatching the army throughout the country to do so, he seems unwilling to overhaul its dysfunctional justice system. “That system,” said Buscaglia, “is quite cosy for the political and business elite.”
Mexico’s congress did pass new acts designed to reform the justice system in 2008. And with reform, said Buscaglia, “the capacity of organized crime to capture the judiciary would be limited.” But the president has done nothing to actually implement those changes. For Buscaglia, judicial reform is “a joke—two years have gone by and nothing substantive has been done.”
For Ackerman, meanwhile, “The big opportunity of democratic transition, the possibility of reforming our institutions, of bringing democracy into the state of itself? Calderon just hasn’t done it.”
And for Buscaglia, “this nightmare will never cease, until the violence and the suffering of average Mexicans reaches the political and business elite, when their families, their persons and their net worth is actually hampered by organized crime, and the monster they created starts to eat them.”

The article above was taken from Canada Deports Mexico’s Drug War Refugees, with Deadly Consequences, published in THIS magazine in Sept., 2010.

Getting Their Act Together

18 Oct

It’s interesting how one of the most common themes taken up when people talk about the Occupy Wall Street movement – aside from marvelling at its staying power – is its lack of focus. At the same many say they support what they’re doing, they complain about the fact that they have no concrete demands and no leaders.

One Idea

So I have been thinking about this lately, after hanging around Toronto’s Occupy Canada site for a while on Saturday, and following a lot of the comments all kinds of people, from my FB friends to Paul Krugman to even a PR expert, have been making. And oddly, I think the point has been lost: namely, that we’re talking about it!
We’re all thinking about the fact that an ever-growing group of people is saying what none of our so-called leaders in politics, business or the media are saying, that there is something very wrong with the status quo. That the wealthy have inordinate power over democratic processes, to the point where the whole shebang is being called into question.
I can’t help but think about some of the social movements I have been following for several years now, from urban poverty activists to La Via Campesina. Often, those movements do not set up a hierarchy of leaders, and purposely so. They want to keep the ideas and opinions of their members bubbling up and flowing to the surface. They want just regular folks to know they’ve got space in there to voice what they think.
The results are always going to be dispersed – but broad. If you look at the Sept. 30th “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” (helpfully provided by a guy on the sidewalk near King subway stop on Saturday), you’ll find a long list of observations and complaints, from the corporate bailouts to illegal foreclosures to media control to a monopolized food system based largely on animal torture. And at the end of that long list there is an asterisk. Below, the asterisk is explained –“These grievances are not all-inclusive.”
Personally, I am hoping that this whole phenomenon is a process, one in which demands will coalesce, and strategies and solutions will – ideally – evolve. We often forget that real democracy is not a small group of people “leading” a far larger one and speaking on their behalf. It’s all about discussion and argument and time, about realizing that, if you want something to change, you need to think about what and say so. I may not have the same issues an unemployed person does. I support the movement because our current government bugs me so much, with its smug, small-minded and self-serving actions, whether that’s denying a union of (mostly female) flight attendants the basic right to demand better conditions and wages through a strike , spending $35 billion on battleships instead of something useful, like infrastucture – or in a recent, under-reported move, blacklisting a Canadian artist named Franke James because her work criticizes the oil-sands project they love so much. (Ms. James said their meddling has caused sponsors in 20 European cities to withdraw support for a tour she was preparing. A nice day’s work for diplomats whose salaries we pay.)

What will happen as the weather grows colder and staying in a park outdoors just becomes crazy? Sure, many people will probably need to move. But I have a feeling that new methods of protest – and above all of getting us to pay attention to the massive injustices that go on around us every day – will manifest themselves. So let’s stick together, and not let the complexity deter us from keeping this great act on the road.

And Another Idea

Mexican President on Trial?

15 Oct

Well, he certainly deserves to be.

Now, a group of lawyers and human rights defenders in Mexico has brought an accusation of war crimes to the International Criminal Court in The Hague. While this may not seem all that surprising, what is both amazing and courageous is that they have added the name of President Felipe Calderón to the suit against the nation’s drug cartels as well. And not just Calderón, but his chiefs of policing and public security too.

At a press conference last week, the participating lawyers explained that the ever more untenable situation of violence is as much the fault of organized criminals as it is of what they call Mexico’s “structural impunity.” And taking into consideration that only 12 percent of crimes are denounced and even less – just eight percent – investigated, the entire policing and justice system is failing the citizens who pay for it.

Meanwhile, the violence has claimed more than 50,000 lives and caused the displacement of 230,000 people, according to their press release. Another 10,000 people are considered ‘disappeared.’ No wonder that they can therefore claim that “Mexico is living a state of emergency and going through the most dramatic humanitarian crisis of recent history.”

And certainly my own research, carried out for several articles in the past, bears this out. Mexico doesn’t have the slightest capability of effectively dealing with, seeking out and investigating criminals, much less of properly bringing them to trial. Its judicial system is as corrupt as it is inefficient, with thousands of people in prison even though they have committed no crime, and thousands more at large even though they are constantly kidnapping, extorting and murdering people, and shipping huge amounts of illegal drugs.

It is probably six of seven years ago already that the Mexican congress passed a judicial reform act. But as Autonomous National University of Mexico law professor John Mills Ackerman explained to me last year, the executive branch hasn’t implemented any meaningful improvements at all. (It was given a period of eight years to do so, and that time period is almost up.)

So I hope the ICC takes the matter seriously and does set up some form of investigation into the behaviour of the Mexican government. I have believed for a long time that Calderon’s so-called war against the drug dealers has been flawed from the start – and is clearly useless. The big question therefore is whether this has been on purpose, or because he is an idiot.

In future posts, I will probably re-publish some of the information I worked on in the recent past that illustrates this sorry state of affairs. In the meantime, Occupy Wall Street has spread to Toronto today and I have to go and check that out.

Too Little, Too Late?

20 Jul

Chico Mendes and his son Sandino in 1987

Back in the late 1980s, there was a period of perhaps 18 months within which three people I knew were murdered. They all lived in the Amazon, and all but one engaged in political activism focused on the rights of  peasants and forest dwellers in that enormous region. One, Chico Mendes was  — and became even more  — famous; his life, struggles for rubber tapper rights and death was the subject of films and books(including one of my own).

Another, Expedito Ribeiro de Souza, was president of the Sindicato de Trabalhadores Rurais, or Rural Workers Union, in Rio Maria, Para. He was exposing the appalling but widespread use of slave labour on big cattle ranches splayed among the stands of rain forest, and for that was threatened and killed.

The third was an affable, mild-mannered family man named Antenor Moreira. And he was murdered one day while working on his plot of land by a land dealer. They are just a few of the estimated 918 people killed in the Amazon between 1985 and April of this year.

Yet only now is the Brazilian government – already in its third Workers Party government – offering some kind of protection to people like them. At least 131 rural leaders, environmentalists and human rights defenders are slated for either regular visits from police to round-the-clock vigilance. And that list would have been larger if not for the fact that 42 people already on it have already been killed. Among them: the Silvas, a husband-and-wife team killed for trying to stop illegal loggers and charcoal-makers. They had already spent ten years alerting authorities to the threats they were receiving – and which in the end were carried out in cold blood last May.

The big question of course is not why has this taken so long – although that is a big question! – but will the promise of protection do any good? Will it change anything? In the end, if the Brazilian government makes it clear that harassment and killings of activists is always going to investigated and always going to be punished, there will be a lot less incentive to shoot someone for a $4000 (the price on the head of Jose Claudio Ribeiro da Silva ,for example.)

But that message is not being sent.

It would have to begin with the trials and sentencing, to name just one case, of the military personnel responsible for killing 19 Sem Terra rural workers in the state of Para in 1996. It would have to go on to bring justice to the many other criminals who are easily identified but living safely because of the power they (or their bosses) wield economically and politically in the region. It might even veer towards taking away or severely reducing the holdings of these people and turning them into extractive reserves, thus actually preserving rain forest.

Lucio Flavio Pinto

Meanwhile, another friend – and valuable source of information on the dirty dealings at play in the Amazon – Lucio Flavio Pinto, continues to receive threats.  The editor of the renowned  Jornal Pessoal, he received an International Press Freedom award in 2005 from the Committee to Protect Journalists. Yet the fact that he still has ample subject matter to expose in the Jornal Pessoal would seem to indicate that something far deeper than individual protection for those who seek justice in the Amazon is seriously lacking.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Amazon, photo by Andrei Smoler

Crossing the Line: was it Carmen or Calderon?

8 Feb

Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui

Yesterday followers of respected Mexican journalist Carmen Aristegui found out that her morning radio/television program had been cancelled, and Carmen herself fired from broadcaster MVS Noticias. The reason behind the move by MVS was ostensibly her breeching of its code of journalistic ethics.

The previous Friday, Carmen had referred to an earlier incident in the national  Chamber of Deputies, where politicians of the left had brandished a banner that graphically broached a subject that has been much discussed but never proven: to wit, President Felipe Calderon’s excessive fondness for the bottle.

“Would you let a drunk drive your car?” said the banner. “Then why let one drive your country?” Deputies from Calderon’s National Action party protested and took down the offending standard, yet as Carmen asked during her Friday program, “ Does Felipe Calderon have problems of alcoholism? This deserves, I insist, a serious, formal and official response from the presidency of the republic itself.”

While Calderon’s drinking problem may be a rumour, the incident in the Chamber of Deputies was certainly news. What’s more, if he were doing a relatively good job of governing the country, the answer might not even matter.

But certainly in his war against the drug cartels, the disastrous results of which I am writing about this week, does raise some serious questions about the man’s sense of judgment. Not to mention his deplorable inability in dealing with Mexico’s poverty, lack of democracy, lousy education system and various other ills.

Now, with Carmen’s abrupt sacking, that sense of judgment is even more dubious. Fielding accusations of censorship, the government says it had nothing to do with it. But just look at this sentence from  declaration made by presidential spokesperson, Alejandra Sota, to CNN this morning. “During the weekend, executives from MVS confirmed their decision to terminate the working contract with Aristegui,” she wrote, “for not having complied with the code of ethics she had signed with the company.”

As Seth Myers of Saturday Night Lives likes to say: “Really?” A company contacts you on a weekend to tell you they have fired someone and we’re to believe you had nothing to do with it? Really?

So now the question is clear – Did Carmen Aristegui cross a line?  Or was it in fact the government of Felipe Calderon in committing what looks a lot like censorship. To me, the answer seems equally clear, and only makes me wonder how dim-witted Felipe Calderon thinks we must all be.

 

Saving los 33 – More Than a Miracle

15 Oct

Watching the reaction last night to the gripping finale of the Chilean miners’ saga, I was struck by how many people kept referring to the successful extraction from their underground prison “a miracle.”

Clearly, though, rather than magic, it was an extraordinary feat of engineering that saved their lives – much as some of the miners credit their faith in God with managing to stick out 69 days in a collapsed mine 700 metres below ground.

Yet the amazing work of those engineers who worked quickly to not only find the miners, but communicate with them and eventually bring all of them to safety, reminds me of an organization a lot of people might not know much about: Engineers Without Borders.

Admittedly, I don’t usually think of engineers as a — shall we say  – particularly altruistic lot. Their skills allow them to do a great deal of good, but also harm. And while it are politicians, not engineers, who decide to do it in the first place, they are the ones who find ways to build dams in the Amazon and run freeways through underprivileged urban neighbourhoods or places like the Frederick Law Olmstead-designed park in Buffalo.

Meanwhile, male engineering students have a reputation for being little more than a macho and irresponsible bunch of guys, the phrase “Engineers Rule the World’ a sort of mantra for them. 

So the amazing work of Engineers Without Borders is a refreshing antidote to that view.  According to EWB’s Kyle Baptista, their various chapters throughout North America counter ERTW with ESTW –Engineers Serve the World — “and that’s really gone head to head with the ERTW mantra,” he says.

Co-founded in 2000 by two University of Waterloo engineering grads, Parker Mitchell and George Roter, this non-profit currently unites some 50,000 professionals and students to combat the root causes of poverty in Africa through development projects. They all believe, according to their website “that the next generation of rural Africans should have the same opportunities to improve their lives, that we have right here at home. To help make this a reality, our members and volunteers apply all the creativity, technical skills and problem-solving approach for which engineers are known.”

In fact,  says Kyle, one factor that led to the establishment of EWB was Roter and Mitchell’s recognition of the under-utilization of the engineering profession in poverty reduction.

Now EWB volunteers spend anywhere from four months to three years in rural African communities, he says, “really understanding the needs before they start working on the ‘soft skills’ and capacity building with other partner organizations. So, a fairly different model and fairly different perspective for engineers.”

And with its focus primarily on the university campus, and chapters developing “on their own” in a host of schools, Engineers Without Borders, he says, “has really sort of polarized the perspective on engineers in Canada.”

Check out their website (Rapper/songwriter K’naan will be performing at their 10th Anniversary gala next Janurary) for more information about this great organization.

Another Tragic Anniversary

8 Oct

 

photo

This girl had just seen her mother killed by the Taliban.

Photo credit: rosewithoutathorn84

It’s been a busy past few weeks, so I missed the anniversary – not that of 9/11, the other one — the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. (October 7th to be precise.) I was reminded again of the absurdity of this enterprise by an article in today’s Globe and Mail, outlining the attempts of the United Arab Emirates government to force the Canadian government to give it lucrative landing rights here in return for continuing use of an air base there called Camp Mirage. Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks this war has nothing to do with bringing good things to the Middle East, even though it would never occur to me to try and reap some sordid benefit from it. The Harper government refuses to be strong-armed though; they’re going to use an airbase in Cyprus – at even greater cost to the taxpayer.

Now, I join most of humanity in finding the Taliban a despicable lot. I don’t agree with the invasion but I know the fundamentalist pseudo-religious group would undoubtedly put someone like me in jail or do worse if they could if I lived in their poverty-stricken nation.

What continues to bother me is the ridiculous notion, taken as a given here by a supine and infotianment-driven media that troops are there to defending Canada. The U.S. uses that ploy as well, only harping on the side issue, that of bringing democracy to the region.

But what constitutes the democracy that is costing nations that have nothing to do with Afghanistan thousands of lives and billions of dollars? The Karzai government. The New York Times ran a long piece a few weeks ago on how the U.S. government can’t figure out why so many Afghanistanis detest this gang of corrupt autocrats. And worse, don’t seem to find the Taliban such an unpalatable option. They have been operating under the assumption that the citizens of that benighted nation can tolerate the corruption, lawlessness and extraordinary injustice that are the hallmarks what of the article called “Corrupt-istan.”

This rationalization says the article, “ seems to have turned out terribly wrong. It now seems clear that public corruption is roundly despised by ordinary Afghans, and it may constitute the single largest factor driving them into the arms of the Taliban.”

Now honestly, this isn’t rocket science.  Previous wars (like Vietnam) have made it pretty clear that people won’t suffer a lazy, murderous, thieving government just because it calls itself democratic. How our governments ever believed that Afghanistan would be okay by simply getting rid of the Taliban – and sticking anything else, however bad, in its place — is beyond comprehension.

I have seen some self-righteous war-boosters point to the Taliban attacks on schools that educate girls as sufficient reason for our continued presence there. But really, in the end, which is worse? A group that won’t let girls go to school, or a group that steals the money to build that school and parks it in what the Times described as “waterfront villas” on “the splendorous avenues of Palm Jumeira in the United Arab Emirates.”

But no one should even be asking that question. Neither option is even remotely acceptable. So why are we propping up one while fighting the other? Why hasn’t occurred to anyone that the people of Afghanistan need to make their own decisions? Is it possible that the decision-makers in our countries are as disdainful of the rights of ordinary Afghans as both the Taliban and the Karzai government? Nine years on and who knows how many deaths at this point and the only message I can think of sending to both the Afghans and the soldiers stationed there, is ‘Sorry.”

 

photo
This photo was taken by Kipp Efinger in Kabul.

Tar babies

19 Sep

Originally uploaded by Greenpeace International

The Petroleum Producers Association of Canada is running a series of promotional spots on television these days. They show nice, just-regular people who happen to work for them in technical capacities, showing us all the great tree-planting and water filtering the Alberta tar sands industry takes on as it extracts usable fuel from the difficult oil laden bitumen.
Yet it is just as difficult to look at some of the deformed fish that are appearing in ever-larger numbers in Lake Athabaska, which is downstream from the oil sands. They have tumours and lesions and missing spines. Their bodies are loaded with contaminants and, as Robert Grandjambe told a Canadian Press reporter, “A lot of people are afraid to eat fish from the lake.”

Various scientific studies have found toxins in the lake, and local doctors are noticing higher-than-average rates of auto-immune diseases, cancer and other medical conditions among the residents of nearby communities. What’s more, another study done a few years ago found that average Albertans gain little from the tar sands boom, with massive profits going to the oil industry and their suppliers alone.

It takes two tonnes of the bitumen to produce a barrel of oil. The process of steam injection and refining it generates anywhere to two to four times the amount of greenhouse gasses per barrel of oil as the production of conventional oil. And six square metres of tailing are created for just one square metre of the bitumen to be mined. Those tailings now sit in extensive ponds, lakes really, of toxic sludge that kill thousands of migratory birds every year. What’s more a 2007 report for one company, Suncor, found that 5 million litres of polluted water had leaked from its lake into the groundwater.

But both the provincial government of Alberta and the Harper government are shrugging off the plethora of studies showing just how damaging the tar sands industry is turning out to be. Since it represents hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and is now responsible for at least half of all petroleum mining in Canada – the largest supplier of oil to the United states – they working hard at maintaining the fiction that this industry is largely benign.

Just like the green, sun-dappled images of those television spots. In reality, only about 2 per cent of ruined land has been reclaimed – a little more than one square kilometre of the 602-square kilometer total. 

The tar sands industry is making itself a lot of money with this archaic energy source. But at the same time, it’s giving rise to successive generations of sick people and even sicker wildlife: Canada’s tar babies, being born into an increasingly devastated environment.
To learn more about the human and environmental toll, check out Tar Sands Watch, and its roster of frightening statistics.

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