CLACS Blog

Morales and Obama at the 5th Summit of the Americas in April 2009 (Source: Radiomundial.com.ve)

Between Evo Morales’s election into office in December 2005 and the final months of the Bush administration, US-Bolivian relations - already fragile from a history of failed neoliberal policies, US support of dictators in the region, and a quagmire of fiscal and geopolitical turmoil - were embittered by a series of tit-for-tat policies, that reached a climax with the suspension of Bolivia from the Andean Trade Preferences and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA) in November of 2008, which was estimated to cost $155 million and between 12,000-85,000 jobs (CEPB, 2008).
Given that the ideological, hemispheric warfare has by and large taken the limelight in the media, namely in the west and the right-wing outlets in Latin America, since the rise of the leftist, indigenous leader, it is essential to reflect upon the policies of the Morales administration, particularly as the 2009 presidential elections approach on the 6th of December. Polls continue to indicate that Morales will be re-elected, but he has also promised that this will be his last term. n. Morales has taken bold steps to fulfil the promises of his 2005 campaign - a new Constitution, regulations on land ownership, large-scale nationalizations - and if re-elected, the success of the next four years will lie in how effectively his administration can reckon with the goals of a socialist agenda and the realities of a capitalist world order.

Continue reading "Bolivia: Reckoning with US Relations and Regional Rifts" »

Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia: COMIBOL

In a speech at the United Nations General Assembly this past September, Bolivian President Evo Morales spoke out against capitalism in the context of climate change:

“The origin of this (climate change and financial) crisis is the exaggerated accumulation of capital in too few hands. It is the permanent removal of natural resources and the commercialization of Mother Earth. The origins come from the system and an economic model of capitalism” (Butler, 2009).

The underlying problem with this anti-capitalist methodology is that Bolivia will indelibly partake in the “commercialization of Mother Earth,” whether it is the national government or foreign companies in control, as the country develops its primary commodity: natural gas. To that end, the Ministry of Hydrocarbons and Energy has recognized that further development of hydrocarbons will engender environmental concerns, as outlined in the September 2008, Estrategia Boliviana de Hidrocarburos. With 710 billion cubic metres (bcm), Bolivia has the second largest natural gas reserves in Latin America. Annually, Bolivia produces about 11.3 bcm for export, of which Brazil takes the lion’s share, at 10 bcm.

Continue reading "Natural Resources and Bolivia: The Populist’s Predicament" »

Last week the King Juan Carlos I Center hosted a symposium organized by NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, NYU CLACS and CU ILAS on Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Titled “After Truth: Justice, Truth, and Reconciliation Commissions, and Related Aftermaths”, the symposium was organized around the opening of two photographic exhibits at the KJCC. One of the exhibits which was originally done in conjunction with and sponsored by Peru’s TRC was titled “Yuyanapaq” which in Spanish means “para recordar” and in English means “in order to remember”. The exhibit that opened at the KJCC is a much condensed version of the original exhibit that was staged in Lima, Peru and featured photographs depicting the “manchay tiempo” or “time of fear”, in reference to the 20 year period of internal armed conflict in Peru. The reality of that time in Peru is that an estimated 70,000 people were killed, many of whom remain disappeared (according to the symposium presentation by forensic anthropologist José Pablo Baraybar, who leads the Equipo Peruano de Antropología, only 2.2% of those have been identified). The photo exhibit is a collection of photos taken by several photographers during that time period, and are meant to foster memory and remembrance of the atrocities that took place. The other exhibit that opened is titled “Si no vuelvo, busquénme en Pútis” or in English “If I don´t return, look for me in Pútis”. Putis is a small village located in the Ayacucho region of Peru. During the “manchay tiempo” the Peruvian Army had established a counter-insurgency post in Pútis, and was responsible for many atrocities carried out against the people of Pútis, sometimes because they suspected them to be terrorists or sympathetic to the terrorists, and sometimes because they desired their goods or herds. The photographic exhibit showcases photographs taken of clothing that had been removed from the victims of a massacre in Pútis carried out by the Peruvian army in which 123 men, women, and children were executed inside of a mass grave. In fact, the grave was dug by the victims, as they had been told it was part of a development project the army was carrying out in the village, and that it would be a trout farm. Once the hole was dug, the soldiers demanded people to enter the hole and then executed them. The army then took their cows. As part of the TRC, an exhumation of the mass grave site, which was right behind the church in Pútis, was conducted in which community members were allowed to observe and be involved in. Some were able to claim their dead based on the clothing that was removed from the bodies. The exhumation was followed by ceremonial burials of the uncovered dead. Later, photographs were taken of the process as well as the articles of clothing that were recovered.

In addition to many wonderful presentations by scholars and academics around the images of the exhibits, and around TRCs in general, one special guest was the mayor of Pútis, Gerardo. While Gerardo was here, we had the good fortune of asking him to come to our Quechua class. In our small class, we had an hour long conversation with him in Quechua about many things such as what crops they plant, what markets they buy and sell their goods in, what his family is like, etc. We were able to ask him many questions. One question I asked is “Imayna yuyankichis chay manchay tiempota”, which means “how do you remember that time of fear?” His response was that he saw it, the violence, with his own eyes. How could they not remember if they saw it? He was 25 when it started. He told us how he lost 2 sons to the military one day when they came in and took all the children away. He still wonders if maybe they are living in Lima, working. He also emphasized that although the mass grave from the massacre in Pútis in which 123 were killed in one day has been exhumed, hundreds more are still missing, still “disappeared”. So the point is that even though the TRC has come and gone, and many conservatives in Peru are still trying to discredit and undo the “truth” that the TRC produced, there are still so many that have not seen any kind of justice at all. There are still so many that continue to wonder where their loved ones are. As José Pablo Baraybar put it in his introduction to the companion report to the “Si no vuelvo, busquénme en Pútis” exhibit, “Those who live, those who are here, those who never left, remember them and keep them on this side of the world, the world of every day. They think of them, speak to them, tell them their sorrows; that of the mother anguished by not knowing, of the younger brother who had no one to defend him, of the sister he never could care for or protect”.

The 2009/2010 school year has begun at NYU and there are many exciting things happening at CLACS this semester. Ada Ferrer, who was previously a CLACS affiliated faculty, is now the Director of the center for a three year term. Students have returned from summer research trips and there is a new incoming class of students who you can read about at, http://clacs.as.nyu.edu/object/clacs.people.gradstudents

Unique to this semester is the presence of James Dunkerley who is currently the Andrés Bello Chair in Latin American Cultures and Civilizations at the King Juan Carlos Center. Dunkerley will be giving a lecture on November 17 titled, “Andrés Bello and the Role of Scholarship in Nation-Building” and is teaching the course “Ideas and Power in Spanish America: 1512 to “Now.””

CLACS is also very excited to present the Fall 2009 Research Colloquium Series titled, “Cuba: History, Culture and Revolution.” The Series will host nine scholars from the United States, Spain and Cuba and the events will take place on Monday evenings from 5-7pm in the KJCC Auditorium following the graduate course of the same name, which is taught by Ada Ferrer. Details for the Research Colloquium Series can be found here, http://clacs.as.nyu.edu/object/clacs.events.colloquium

The other day I was walking by the library at UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) and noticed a series of tall, skeletal-like trees next to me. They were “spent” magueys; once the plant reaches sexual maturity it sends up a flowering stalk about the height of a small tree and then withers. It made me think more concretely about the incredible time investment that people in the pulque industry made in these plants. It can take between eight and twenty-five years for one plant to reach maturity and, if you don’t “castrate” the plant in time, it’s impossible to harvest it for agua miel (the unfermented precursor of pulque).
Since trying a “curado” pulque (flavored with tomatoes) from Xochimilco—a place that keeps coming up In the eighteenth-century records I’ve been looking at—I’ve been thinking a bit about the risks of a lost investment in a maguey in terms of the liquid itself. Pulque spoiled quickly—within a matter of days—and If you didn’t judge the market correctly, you could lose an investment measured in terms of years. I’ve found repeated mentions of colonial-era prosecutions for the adulteration of pulque through the addition of fruits, roots, or herbs. Of course, most of these records emphasize that the purpose of said alteration is to make a stronger beverage, but I wonder if this doesn’t reflect more the prejudices of colonial record-makers than the realities on the ground. Mixing juices and other materials with soured pulque (in the period I study, referred to as tepache) would result in a stronger drink, but mainly because the pulque itself becomes stronger. The question becomes, is the adulteration of pulque mainly a way of disguising the flavor of soured pulque in order to sell it? And how does one find the answer to this?
Furthermore, the desiccated plant remains were, at the time of the Conquest, a form of fuel for Tenochtitlán. Looking at the spent plant, I could certainly see why… but what happened to them during the colonial period? I’ve been spending some time with the AGN search engines trying to find this info…

Greetings from São Paulo.
Since I arrived here I’ve been researching and gathering material on police violence and prison rebellions as part of a larger project on the shortcomings of the Brazilian democratic regime as it exists since 1985. More specifically, I’m interested in exploring a legacy of torture and violence in the State security apparatuses inherited from the country’s military dictatorships, and the silence around this issue in Brazilian literary and cinematic production. Ultimately, I’d like to examine this symptomatic evasion in literature and film, and its subsequent displacement onto themes of gang and prison violence.

Initially, my plan had been to focus my research in the archives at NEV (Núcleo de Estudos da Violência), an institute connected to the University of São Paulo (USP). Yet as soon as I arrived and began talking to researchers and scholars, I found out about a special seminar on the thirty years of amnesty in Brazil, organized by Janaína Teles and Márcio Seligmann-Silva, which was going to discuss the amnesty law created immediately following Brazil’s last military dictatorship.

The seminar, which was organized in part to raise awareness about the issue, and partly to create pressure on the government to revisit the amnesty law, couldn’t have been more helpful or a propos of my subject. I therefore spent my first week in São Paulo accessing material in the NEV archives, and my second week attending the various round tables of the seminar. Round tables were organized around topics such as: “The International Rights of Human Rights Faced with the Impunity of Dictatorships in Latin America,” “The access to information and public archives”, “Settling accounts with the past; Truth commissions”, “Amnesty in Latin America and in the Inter-American system of human rights”, among others.

The seminar was held in the Law School of the University of São Paulo, and hosted speakers from all over Latin America, the United States, Germany and South Africa (although unfortunately the South African speaker canceled at the last minute). These included ex-political prisoners, who provided testimonies, and important personalities such as Nora Cortiñas, from the Madres de la plaza de Mayo, Peter Kornbluh, from the National Security Archive of the United States, and Pedro Nikken, ex-president of the Interamerican court of Human Rights.

Over the four days, a fruitful comparative approach was developed; a point reiterated by several speakers was that a society that doesn’t punish its torturers and criminals ultimately fosters a climate of violence and impunity. Carlos Alberto Rozanski, president of the Federal Criminal Court of La Plata, spoke of the need to condemn former State torturers, and provided Argentina as a model that Brazil could follow. In his words: “Yo creo que sin verdad no se puede haber justicia, sin justicia no se puede haber reparación, y sin reparación no se puede haber memoria”.

This raised a crucial point that I am exploring in my work on Brazilian literary and cultural production, which is an apparent absence of memory, manifested as an evasion of the theme of political and State violence. Professor Márcio Seligmann-Silva, a literary scholar and professor at UNICAMP, spoke very eloquently about this culture of forgetting in Brazil, which contaminates the cultural sphere and produces a literature of silence.

I’ll be returning to New York in a couple of days, and I look forward to examining the material I collected at NEV, and to following the leads provided in the various talks given at the amnesty seminar—a wonderful and unexpected bonus of the trip.

Cheers from Sao Paulo, again! Today is my last day here – and Friday was my last day at the Ouvidoria. Since I came to Brazil, I’ve been researching denunciations of police corruption at the Police Ombudsman. As it usually happens in every field work, I had some minor problems that, at the end, opened some other opportunities to develop my research.
I was supposed to collect around 800 cases at the Ouvidoria and I thought I would have time to do so. Yet, due some changes at the office – the nomination of a new Chief Ombudsman and consequently the beginning of some rearrangements there – I ended up “losing” one week because they didn’t have time enough to select/separate the cases I needed to copy. When they did so, I (re)started my work, but this time, instead of being alone in a room like in the first two weeks, I worked at the attendance room (where they receive, classify and refer all denunciations). In other words, the delay gave me the opportunity to observe a little more how the institution works – thus, even though my research isn’t about the institution itself, it definitely helps me contextualize and further understand the denunciations I’m working with. For instance, in a conversation with what one could define as the” non-official chief of the attendance”, he told me: “Ouvidoria is lap”, which means, it’s a place where people can talk and complain about any kind of police misconduct; where those who feel their rights have been violated will be heard with attention and respect – maybe it’s not for grant the fact that most of those who do this work are social assistants. Even if their work isn’t effective – in the sense that the denunciations should develop into fair investigations and, whenever the case, the punishment of those convicted – the very fact that citizens have this space where they have the freedom to talk, to expose their ideas and fight for their rights is in itself a major feature of what many thinkers call Democracy. Finally, maybe it’s not for granted as well the fact that many insane people (which are called “official nuts” because they’re always the same ones) constantly call and/or go to the Ouvidoria to denounce and complain about all sorts of conspiracies against them, which poses another interesting question: how one can really know what is hallucination and what is reality? Well, I guess this would be a beautiful theme for another study…

Uno de los objetivos de mi viaje era seguir el rastro de los archivos de los procesos judiciales de reforma agraria que se llevaron a cabo después de 1953 en los departamentos de Cochabamba y La Paz, pues para mi tesis estoy interesada en estudiar los procesos de afectación y redistribución de tierras después de la reforma.

Para La Paz
Sabia de antemano que esa información no estaba en el Archivo histórico del Departamento de La Paz y tampoco se encontraba en el Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria. Uno de los retos de este viaje era encontrar donde había quedado esa información.

Encontré que los juicios de afectación de haciendas estaban guardados en el Instituto Nacional de Reforma Agraria (INRA) a nivel departamental. El INRA departamental no es propiamente un archivo histórico sino más bien un archivo judicial que esta en el centro de la ciudad y al que deben asistir alrededor de 100 personas en promedio cada día. Es una oficina con gran afluencia de abogados, miembros de las comunidades campesinas y comunidades indígenas, dirigentes de cooperativas demandando a los mas o menos 5 abogados, y alrededor de 10 o 15 auxiliares que ahí trabajan copias de algunos de los documentos que requieren para proseguir algún trámite judicial (tales como consolidación de su títulos de propiedad a nivel personal o comunal, etc). No hablamos pues de un espacio apto para historiadores sino para abogados donde los litigios, enojos y estreses están a la orden del día.

De hecho, creo que un tema de investigación fascinante seria analizar por ejemplo los encuentros y desencuentros cotidianos de la ciudadanía con el Estado. Es decir, si nos alejáramos brevemente del propio material del archivo, resultaría igualmente fascinante concentrarse en las interacciones de la ciudadanía con los funcionarios estatales. Mas allá de la norma, mas allá de los derechos que esos demandantes puedan tener; la posibilidad de conseguir y hacer valer esos derechos depende de con quien se habla, en que momento se habla, quien demanda, etc. Genero, etnicidad, nivel de educación, idioma, etc todas son variables que juegan un rol trascendental en las respuestas que uno puede obtener del estado.

Como se imaginaran lo último que se espera ver en una oficina de estas características es un historiador. Es así que mi entrada tuvo que estar mediada por cartas, permisos.

Una vez logrado mi ingreso al archivo me dedique centralmente a trata de mapear la información organizada en cajas de distintos colores para cada provincia. Para la provincia de Omasuyos - que es la que me interesa trabajar - existen 103 cajas que contienen alrededor de 500 expedientes.

Como disponía de escaso tiempo el propósito de esta primera entrada era claramente garantizar acceso al archivo y verificar que era posible disponer de esa información para la realización de mi tesis. En las semanas programadas para trabajar este archivo intente extraer líneas generales que me permitirán en el futuro hacer efectiva la investigación de un archivo tan voluminoso. Decidí revisar en detalle pocos expedientes lo que me permitiría, por una parte, tener una primera idea de cuánto tiempo se requiere para revisar cada caso y, por otra parte, cual es el tipo de información que me puede ofrecer estos procesos judiciales

Revise para el caso de La Paz alrededor de 17 cajas. Cada caja contiene entre dos a tres procesos judiciales diferentes. Se trata de expedientes voluminosos y por ello al principio no estaba segura si deberia tomar notas, fotografiarlos, o que. Decidi en los primeros casos empezar a tomar notas, que aunque tarda mucho tiempo uno tiene a su favor que uno tiene la posibilidad de explorar un caso en detalle y ver las multiples posiblidades que puede ofrecer un caso. Despues del tercer expediente decidi que era mejor revisar el caso, marcar los folios mas importantes y fotografiarlos. Usando este ultimo metodo es que pude revisar 17 cajas es decir alrededor de 50 expedientes. De lo contrario hubiera tomado mucho mas tiempo.

Cheers from Brazil! Two weeks ago I arrived in São Paulo to collect the data for my research on police corruption at the Police Ombudsman Office (Ouvidoria). Though I’ve lived 8 years in this city prior moving to NYC, it feels that coming here after exactly 1 year away has a different “taste”: maybe my experiences in NYC have exacerbated my critical look towards the city.

This exercise of alteridade begun right before my plane landed: the Brazilian air plane company I was flying with screened a promotional video about Sao Paulo emphasizing it’s multiculturalism, it’s dynamism and it’s “inner character” for both entertainment and business. Images of “the city that can never stop” were edited in accordance to this idea of movement and velocity. For a moment, it felt like we had returned to JFK! I couldn’t stop thinking about it for the next couple of weeks – it seems that Sao Paulo sees (and sells) itself as a sort of Brazilian New York; actually, more specifically as Manhattan.

Ironically, the next week I saw two exhibitions at MASP – the MoMA of Sao Paulo (?) – that brought again those thoughts in my mind. The first one, entitled To Look and Be Seen, was about modern portraits and had the following explanatory sentence: “(…) however the great similarity between the portrait and the portraited (…) they do not reveal themselves entirely, do not expose themselves. What is seen is the persona, the mask the subjects wear to let themselves be seen (when not to see their own selves). In a way, this is an attribute of most portraits if not of all”. The second exhibit was about myth, art and reality, which also had an interesting phrase that caught my attention: “(…) Man is an animal that tells himself stories, this is what distinguishes him from all other species. And myth is one of the first stories, of the first forms of meaning that man gave himself. Jacob Bryant, mentioned by Edgar A. Poe in his famous novel about the stolen letter, wrote that we keep forgetting that we do not believe in fables but keep acting according to them as if they were existing realities”. In this sense, was that video a sort of portrait of a paulista mythology? Anyhow, what exactly all these thoughts have to do with my own research? I still have no idea… but it will definitely remind me about the importance of always paying attention to the correlations of three processes whatever my object of research is: how one sees himself, how one portraits himself and what one hides about himself!

This post comes nearly two weeks after my return to the United States from Montevideo, Uruguay. As I could have predicted, my last couple weeks in Uruguay were conducted at a feverish pace as I struggled to fit last-minute interviews, museum and archive visits, events, and political marches into my last days in the field. I think my efforts paid off, and I’m happy to report that I was able to interview over forty subjects about the Ley de Caducidad (Expiry Law), each representing a wide range of political, ideological, and social perspectives on the law. Highlights of my last two weeks in Uruguay include interviews with the former president of Uruguay, Julio Maria Sanguinetti, presidential candidate Pedro Bordaberry, Senator Rafael Michelini, and other members of the Uruguayan government who were astonishingly easy to gain access to, despite my somewhat questionable status as a graduate student with no real press credentials (yet!). I was struck by the receptiveness of all my subjects, and could literally walk into Colorado Party headquarters off the street, ask for the phone numbers of the list of politicians I’d written down, and immediately receive a detailed list of work, home, and cell phone numbers. One party secretary scheduled an interview for me on the spot with the former Defense Minister, who received me in his home in Carrasco. While I’ve never enjoyed this level of access in the United States, it also created problems I hadn’t anticipated. Looking back, I regret not beginning the process sooner during my research – I may have been able to interview Tabaré Vazquez, the president of Uruguay and an important subject since he initially withheld his public support of the referendum on the Expiry Law and his party, the Frente Amplio, never attempted to repeal the law despite holding a majority of seats in Parliament. I’m sure it would be difficult to achieve the same level of access as in any other country as a student, but conducting interviews in Uruguay, “el país de las cercanías”, was an incredibly rewarding and fascinating experience.

I also spent several days at the Punta Carretas Shopping (my other topic of research), observing visitors to the mall in Punta Carretas, formerly a prison. I conducted a series of brief oral interviews with shoppers of all ages and was surprised that my original assumption that most visitors to the mall would be members of the middle and upper-middle class from the most affluent neighborhoods of the city was mistaken. In fact, a number of people I spoke to came from very far away (the neighboring province of Canelones, and I even spoke to two Paraguayan immigrants) and several of the shoppers were from working-class neighborhoods. My sample size was too small to make any sweeping generalizations about the kind of people who shop at Punta Carretas or how they feel about memorializing the prison that once existed there, but it was a very interesting journalistic and sociological exercise since I’d never done an oral survey before. Again, I regret not beginning the process sooner (if I had done this twice a week during my entire time in the country, my findings would be more conclusive). I was surprised that anyone would talk to me at all, but the fact that I was affiliated with a foreign university helped me more than I could ever have anticipated.

My last full day in Montevideo coincided with the kick-off of the campaign for the “papeleta rosada”, named for the pink color of the ballot that Uruguayans voting to repeal the Ley de Caducidad will put in their voting envelopes in the October 25th national elections. This event was the perfect conclusion to a summer spent interviewing former political prisoners and human rights activists, and I saw many familiar faces in the paraninfo of the University of the Republic of Uruguay, the same auditorium where Che Guevara came to speak to the Uruguayan public in 1961. Seated at the front of the auditorium were members of the Coordinadora para la Anulación de la Ley de Caducidad, several of whom I had interviewed, and other important cultural figures in Uruguay including writer Eduardo Galeano and popular musician Daniel Viglietti, whose emotional performance at the end of the night brought everyone in the audience (and the overflow crowd watching outside) to their feet. I realized then that for every person in the audience I had interviewed this summer, there were at least twenty people I hadn’t, and I know that my project can only really scratch the surface of over twenty years of struggle, frustration, and preserverance for every Uruguayan committed to bringing human rights violators to justice. This popular movement is at once twenty years in the making and only just beginning – the campaign to repeal the Ley de Caducidad started in earnest the day I left Uruguay, but the struggle for “memoria, justicia, y nunca más” will continue long after Uruguayan voters make their decision on October 25th.