Red Pepper » Nick Buxton

The secure and the damned

admin — Sun, 24 Mar 2013 14:31:46 +0000

Metro Manila, the Philippines. Photo: Asian Development Bank
The world’s political leaders couldn’t say they hadn’t been warned. In the run up to the UN climate negotiations in Qatar in December, it wasn’t just the World Bank, the International Energy Agency and global accounting firm PWC predicting dangerous levels of climate change. Even nature appeared to sound alarm bells with unseasonal hurricanes devastating New York and islands in the Caribbean and the Philippines. Faced with this chorus, you might have expected a response from the world’s governments. Instead the summit passed almost unnoticed by the international media and the result was another empty declaration, described by Friends of the Earth as a ‘sham of a deal’ that ‘fails on every count’.
Confronted with one of the greatest challenges our planet and its peoples have faced, our political leaders have clearly failed us. In stark contrast to the radical, coordinated action to bail out banks and prop up the financial system, governments have instead chosen to step aside, giving a free hand to the markets and the fossil fuel giants, rather than daring a carefully planned conversion of our carbon-based economies. Their choice is not one of inaction, as is often suggested, but one of actively ensuring dangerous climate change. Every coal plant built in China, oil field mined in the Arctic, or shale gas field fracked in the US locks carbon into the atmosphere for up to 1,000 years and means that even radical steps to decarbonise in future years may not be sufficient to prevent runaway global warming.
The president of the World Bank, Dr Jim Yong Kim, said their report’s predicted rise in temperatures of 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit before the end of the century would create a world that was ‘very frightening’. For the first time, the issue of how to pay for the ‘loss and damage’ that climate change is already causing for the poorest and most vulnerable people worldwide took centre stage at Doha. It is a tragic irony that discussions about stopping or preparing for global climate change (known as ‘mitigation and adaptation’ in UN language) have now been upstaged by demands for reparations and concern, not least in the insurance industry, about who or what is going to pay for the damage.
These narratives are deeply distressing and disempowering. It is now much easier for people to imagine a dystopian future for their children than a world that has pulled together to prevent the worst effects of climate change. Far from prompting mass action, fear and insecurity is apparently prompting people to turn off and tune out in droves, or to seek solace in conspiracy theories.
Profiting from insecurity
This apathy is being exploited by those who welcome – or at the very least are looking to profit from – the politics of insecurity and what the Pentagon has dubbed ‘the age of consequences’. Across the world and often behind closed doors, securocrats and military strategists are engaging in ‘foresight’ exercises that – unlike their political masters – take climate change for granted and develop options and strategies to adapt to the risks and opportunities it presents.
Only a month before the Doha climate negotiations, the US National Academy of Sciences released a report commissioned by the CIA that sought to ‘evaluate the evidence on possible connections between climate change and US national security concerns’. The study concluded that it would be ‘prudent for security analysts to expect climate surprises in the coming decade, including unexpected and potentially disruptive single events as well as conjunctions of events occurring simultaneously or in sequence, and for them to become progressively more serious and more frequent thereafter, most likely at an accelerating rate’.
The military and the intelligence community’s willingness to take climate change seriously has been often uncritically welcomed by some in the environmental community; the agencies themselves say they are just doing their job. The question very few people are asking is: what are the consequences of framing climate change as a security issue rather than a justice or human rights one?
In a world already demeaned by concepts like ‘collateral damage’, participants in these new climate war games need not speak candidly about what they envisage, but the subtext to their discourse is always the same: how can states in the industrialised North – at a time of increasing potential scarcity and, it is assumed, unrest – secure themselves from the ‘threat’ of climate refugees, resource wars and failed states, while maintaining control of key strategic resources and supply chains? In the words of the proposed EU climate change and international security strategy, for example, climate change is ‘best viewed as a threat multiplier’ which carries ‘political and security risks that directly affect European interests’.
The industries that thrive off the ugly realpolitik of international security are also preparing for climate change. In 2011, a defence industry conference suggested that the energy and environmental market was worth at least eight times its own trillion-dollar-a-year trade. ‘Far from being excluded from this opportunity, the aerospace, defence and security sector is gearing up to address what looks set to become its most significant adjacent market since the strong emergence of the civil/homeland security business almost a decade ago,’ it suggested.
Some of these investments may prove welcome and important, but the climate security discourse is also helping fuel the investment boom in high-tech border control systems, crowd control technologies, next-generation offensive weapons systems (such as drones) and less-lethal weapons. Every year a few more applications are piloted, and a few more hit the market. Looking at the consolidation of militarised borders across the world over the past decade, you wouldn’t want to be a climate refugee in 2012, never mind 2050.
It is not just the coercive industries that are positioning themselves to profit from fears about the future. The commodities upon which life depends are being woven into new security narratives based on fears about scarcity, overpopulation and inequality. Increasing importance is attached to ‘food security’, ‘energy security’, ‘water security’ and so on, with little analysis of exactly what is being secured for whom, and at whose expense? But when perceived global food insecurity is fuelling land grabs and exploitation in Africa, and rising food prices are causing widespread social unrest, alarm bells should be ringing.
Winners and losers
The climate security discourse takes these outcomes for granted. It is predicated on winners and losers – the secure and the damned – and based on a vision of ‘security’ so warped by the ‘war on terror’ that it essentially envisages disposable people in place of the international solidarity so obviously required to face the future in a just and collaborative way.
To confront this creeping securitisation of our future, we must of course continue to fight to end our fossil fuel addiction as urgently as possible, joining movements such as those fighting tar sands and forming broad civic alliances that pressure towns, states and governments to transition their economies to a low-carbon footing. We cannot stop climate change – it is already happening – but we can still prevent the worst effects.
However, we must also be prepared to reclaim the climate adaptation agenda from one based on acquisition through dispossession to one based on universal human rights and the dignity of all people.
The recent experience of Hurricane Sandy, where the Occupy movement put the US federal government to shame in its response to the crisis, shows the power of popular movements to respond positively to local disasters. Yet local responses by themselves will not be enough. We need broader international strategies that check corporate and military power while globalising the tools for resilience. This means putting forward progressive solutions around food, water, energy and coping with extreme weather that provide viable alternatives to governments’ market-based and security-obsessed approaches. Perhaps most importantly, we need to start packaging these ideas in positive visions for the future that will empower people to reject dystopia and reclaim a liveable, just future for all.
Nick Buxton and Ben Hayes are co-editors of a forthcoming book on the securitisation of climate change, to be published by the Transnational Institute in 2013

Drug club: Spain’s alternative cannabis economy

admin — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 10:43:46 +0000

The room looks like the office of any small membership organisation: old worn furniture, jammed bookshelves, promotional posters, dented filing cabinets, random boxes of materials that have never been filed. What stands out, though, is the cloying smell of marijuana that permeates the room of the Pannagh Association in the city centre of Bilbao in northern Spain. Pannagh’s president, a young, energetic Martín Barriuso Alonso, brings out the source of the odour from the locked filing cabinets. Inside metal boxes are neatly labelled plastic bags: Critical Mass, White Widow, Medicine Man, New York Diesel, Aka 47, all ready for distribution.
It’s six o’clock on a Thursday, and soon Pannagh’s members start arriving to pick up their bags. The first is Miguel Angel, who has HIV and recently underwent a liver transplant. Then Javier, who just consumes because, hey, he enjoys it. Pannagh (which means cannabis in Sanskrit) has 300 members who each pay 40 euros a year membership and then four euros per gram, about half the rate on the black market. Some take a bag of five grams, others 10. The maximum allowed is 60 grams per month.
Legal grey area
The existence of Pannagh and up to 300 similar clubs throughout Spain is down to a quirky grey area in Spanish law. It is also the product of a determined group of activists who have pushed at the openings in the law to try to formalise their existence. In 1974 the Spanish supreme court judged that drug consumption and possession for personal use was not a crime, while still deeming drug trafficking an imprisonable offence. This created a jurisprudence in which providing drugs for compassionate reasons, and joint purchase by a group of addicts – as long as it did not involve profit-seeking – were not crimes either.
It was in 1993, however, that the law was really put to the test, when the Asociación Ramón Santos de Estudios Sobre el Cannabis (Ramon Santos Association for the Study of Cannabis, ARSEC) caught the media spotlight by publicly and openly growing cannabis for 100 of its members. The crop was confiscated, only for the provincial court to acquit those involved before the supreme court eventually ruled that although it was clear that ARSEC did not intend to traffic drugs, the cultivation of cannabis was dangerous per se and therefore should be punished.
This legal cat-and-mouse game continued as other marijuana associations forced a series of contradictory legal decisions, sometimes leading to arrests and at other times prompting no legal intervention. In the case of Pannagh, Martín Barriuso and two other members of the association were detained for three days in 2006 and had their crop confiscated.
A few months later, however, the courts ruled that there had been no crime as ‘it concerned consumption between addicts in which there was no transmission to other parties’ and ordered the police to return the confiscated plants. Seventeen kilograms of marijuana that had been rotting behind bars was returned. Although completely unusable, Barrioso still has it, a decomposing trophy of his minor victory against the system.
The legal uncertainty is far from over, as arrests of members of cannabis clubs continue to occur from time to time. However, decisions by the supreme court in October 2001 and July 2003 contradicted its initial ARSEC judgement and established that possession of cannabis, including large quantities, is not a crime if there is no clear intention of trafficking. This has made possible an explosion of cannabis user associations.
Clubbing together
Due to the lack of clear regulation, associations have had to improvise and invent solutions in order to standardise their activities. The main pioneering groups came together in 2003 as the Federation of Cannabis Clubs (FAC), which initially included 21 clubs. All are non-profit and member-run, and most have similar guidelines, keeping strict and thorough records of cultivation, distribution and costs in case there is any investigation.
As Barriuso recounts, fear of arrest is still there, but most cannabis user associations are now more afraid of thieves stealing their valuable stocks. Some even have their building alarms linked up to the local police station.
There are still many unresolved questions in terms of regulation. Nevertheless the gradual normalisation of these clubs has already marked out Spain as different to that other bastion of European drug liberalism, Holland. As Tom Blickman, a drugs policy researcher for the Transnational Institute explains: ‘The unique nature of cannabis social clubs is that they have legalised both production and consumption of cannabis within a closed club and non-profit system.
Dutch liberal cannabis policy may have minimised criminalisation of users, but it has not resolved the core contradiction known as the back door problem: coffee shops are allowed to sell up to five grams of cannabis to consumers (the front door) but have to buy their stock on the illegal market (the back door). To draw coffee shops out of the criminal sphere entirely, the cultivation of cannabis needs to be regulated.’
The grey area of the law in Spain has led to the development of an economic and social model for drug consumption that might offer a more economically and socially just alternative to market legalisation. ‘I used to think our clubs were just one step towards full legalisation, but now I am not so sure,’ says Martín Barriuso. ‘When the debate is polarised between total prohibition and almost total liberalisation, it seems people have not stopped to think that there are other ways of doing things.’
Legalisation debate
The legalisation of drugs has moved from a fringe demand to an increasingly mainstream concern over the past decade. Advocates of legalisation range from ex-Home Office minister Bob Ainsworth to the former president of Mexico to the Economist. A referendum to legalise cannabis in California in November 2010 was only narrowly defeated.
However the case for legalisation has often been pitched as bringing drugs into the capitalist open market – in the words of some advocates, to start selling heroin as if it was Coca-Cola. Yet that would turn drugs into commodities, subject to the same manipulations and abuses of the international market as other legalised drugs, such as alcohol. A legalised cannabis market, driven by profit, would soon lead to drugs supply controlled by a few, driven by profit, involving unethical promotional practices and with little concern for the health of its users – in many ways a mirror image of the illegal drugs market.
As Martín Barriuso argues, cannabis social clubs provide a viable alternative not just to the illegal but also a legalised ‘free market’ in drugs. ‘What we have found is that the limits imposed by the current legal framework, in particular the obligation to produce and distribute within a closed circle, the control of all production by members, and, above all, the absence of profit, has created a framework of relations that is different and, for us, fairer and more balanced.’
Alternative economy
Barriuso points to the way that direct contact between producers and consumers has made it easier to find a balance between dignified salaries and reasonable prices, replacing competition with a desire for mutual benefit. Direct control of production means that members have full control of the origin, quality and composition of what they are consuming, while generating legal economic activity and tax collection. Accountability within the group means that health concerns (and many of Pannagh’s members consume cannabis for health reasons) are primary.
Given those results, it is not surprising that Barriuso concludes, ‘Now that we have succeeded in obtaining our supply directly and under better conditions, why would we fight for a capitalist market for cannabis, where the power of decision is once again in the hands of a few people and where we no longer control how substances we consume are produced?’
While the future of the Spanish model of cannabis social clubs is by no means guaranteed, it is an idea that is spreading. The Dutch city of Utrecht announced in early 2011 that it plans to experiment with a closed club model for adult recreational cannabis users and other Dutch municipalities have expressed interest in doing the same.
The European Parliament recently heard proposals for an extension of cannabis social clubs across Europe. Pannagh presented evidence, based on its own financial records, that this could create 7,500 direct jobs and around 30,000 indirect jobs in Spain alone. At a European level, it could create 8.4 billion euros additional income for member governments, an attractive proposition at a time of austerity budgets.
‘It could hardly have been expected,’ says Martín Barriuso smiling, ‘but by some strange legal fate, the global prohibition of drugs applied by the Spanish courts has given place to a strange protectionist market for cannabis, where there is economic activity but no profit, entrepreneurs but no businessmen, consumers but no exploitation of producers, and the existence of a legal economy entirely separate from the major distribution outlets and the mainstream economy. In a society such as Spain, facing a deep economic and social crisis after years of speculation, extreme consumerism and easy money, this parallel economy seems now more of an advantage than a disadvantage.’
Martín Barriuso Alonso’s briefing, Cannabis Social Clubs in Spain: a normalising alternative under way, is available at www.tni.org

Fifty years of the ‘war on drugs’
2011 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1961 UN Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs, the agreement that cemented global drug control into an international legal framework that has remained largely unchanged to this day. The subsequent ‘war on drugs’ has led to most countries worldwide using largely military and criminal-justice means in a completely unrealistic attempt to eradicate drugs use.
A coalition of international organisations, including Transform UK, the International Drug Policy Consortium and the Transnational Institute, have joined forces to launch a ‘Count the Costs’ campaign. They argue that while it was no doubt implemented with good intentions, it is now possible, reflecting on the experiences of the past half-century, to conclude that the policy has failed to achieve its goal of reducing or eliminating drug production, supply and use. In fact, drug supply and use has risen dramatically. It has also come at great social costs, fuelling conflict and insecurity in many countries, criminalising vulnerable groups of users and growers, diverting massive resources away from proven public health interventions, and rewarding violent criminal groups.
They campaign is calling on all UN member governments to make a proper assessment of the costs of the ‘war on drugs’ and to use the 50th anniversary to radically reform UN drugs conventions to focus on evidence-based drugs policies that minimise harm for drug users and do not infringe human rights.
Campaign website: www.countthecosts.org

Time to be honest

James O'Nions — Wed, 25 May 2011 21:03:53 +0000

Tim DeChristopher caused consternation among oil executives and their US government cohorts in December 2008 when he won 14 bids at an auction of oil and gas leases in Utah – worth $1.8 million dollars – and then announced he had no intention of using or paying for them. It turned out he was a 28 year old economics student from Salt Lake University, who came to the auction to take direct action to keep fossil fuels in the ground in an area known for its natural beauty.

Forcing delays in the auction in the dying days of the Bush presidency, his action proved successful as most of the leases were subsequently cancelled by the Obama administration. However this environmental victory did nothing to prevent the legal system punishing DeChristopher for his principled audacity. In March 2011, an eight person jury – confined by the parameters set by the judge who disallowed any examination of his motives – found DeChristopher guilty. He will face sentencing on 23 June, and could face up to ten years in jail and up to $750,000 in fines.

Since his arrest, DeChristopher has emerged as a leading and critical voice in the US environmental movement, calling for more radical direct action and slamming the major environmental groups for pursuing a strategy of ‘incrementalism’ that has not delivered results. He has also urged environmentalists to be honest and not pretend we can stop climate change; but instead look to stop its worst effects and make sure that we undermine the structures and corporations that will try to benefit from the climate crisis. Red Pepper writer Nick Buxton spoke with DeChristoper at a student-led conference on sustainability at the University of California of Davis on 30 April 2011.

What were the influences that led you to disrupt the auction in Utah?

Well I was always interested in the environment. After high school, I spent five and a half years working with so-called ‘troubled youth’, taking them out into the wilderness. It soon became clear to me that they were good kids, but ones who didn’t fit into a broken system. As I explored this, I could see that all decisions for organising the world were based around and argued in terms of economics, and that is why I went to study economics at Salt Lake University.

While at university, I helped set up a group focused on outdoor conservation and recreation, and started to get involved in environmental campaigning and the fight against the climate crisis. By 2008, I had made a personal commitment to take direct action, such as the one I took at the oil and gas auction, if an opportunity presented itself.

What did you learn from your experience of taking direct action?

I went into the auction with the typical direct action mindset: that if I could take direct action to keep the oil in the ground then it would be worth it. I have since learned that the indirect impacts of direct action are even more powerful, in terms of inspiring others to take action and stimulating discussion on what our role as citizens should be.

I also went in thinking that I was sacrificing my freedom by taking such an action. This is not really the case. The sacrifice had happened before: when I had spent years being obedient to a system that is powerful and destructive; when I accepted the myth I had no power to change things; when I voluntarily disempowered myself.

The moment I fully resisted this system, I discovered real power and liberation. I would never go back.

Why do you think environmental movements, particularly in the US, have been so ineffectual in mobilising an effective response to the greatest crisis humanity faces?

I think it is because we are a nation of people who consume a lot, and have therefore become far too comfortable with the system to dare to change it. The main control the system has is through scaring people that they have too much to lose by challenging it, and that we need to hold on to what we have.

I think also the problem is that we have too many rich people in the leadership of the environmental movement, who have benefited from the status quo. It is hard to change the world when you have little personal investment in changing it.

What do you say to the mainstream environmental groups, who argue that working within the system is the only way to deliver environmental policies?

We have had plenty of opportunity to work within the system. In the 1980s and 1990s, asking the power structures to do the right thing was perhaps a reasonable strategy, but not any more. A huge amount of money has been spent and it has failed catastrophically. Environmental groups got into bed with corporations such as Shell and Dupont – in alliances such as the Climate Action Partnership – to produce a US climate bill last year that was worse than nothing, strengthened the fossil fuel industry and completely deflated the climate movement.

The reality is that the green movement has spent a lot of time studying science and economics, but not history – understanding how change happens in this country.

We can, for example, learn a great deal from the experiences of the Freedom Riders in the civil rights movement who decided to act and directly challenge bus segregation, against the advice of Martin Luther King who said it was a bad idea. The first group of students was repeatedly attacked and almost killed, but prior to their journey they had already sent a message to ask others to pick up where they left off. And they did. Students and activists soon filled the jails of Mississippi and they brought about an end to bus segregation. The key is they never had an end date to their actions, and they won.

In the US, we are gearing up for a huge summer of direct action against coal, and particularly the devastating practice of mountain top removal in the Appalachian mountains. We have a huge march on Blair Mountain in early June, and then are calling on people to join a rolling programme of busloads of arrests every day after that over the summer.

At a US youth environmental conference, called Powershift in April 2011, you caused a stir when you said we should face up to the truth that we have already lost the battle against climate change. Can you say more about this and the challenges environmental movements now face?

Our challenge has changed. It is no longer about just reducing emissions. We have to work out how to hold on to our humanity as we head to increasingly difficult times.

The turning point for me was when Terry Root, a lead author of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me privately after an event at Stanford University that it was too late to stop a climate crisis, that her generation had failed mine. I was shocked and asked why she had not said that on the public panel. And she said that she was scared that saying the truth would paralyse people. And it is true, what she said did first put me into a dark place of despair. I found myself mourning my own future, knowing it could be nothing like my parents. But sharing that grief with others, I found knowing the truth also empowered me to fight back in a more serious way.

I can see why scientists and environmentalists shy away from talking about the truth. No-one enters the world of climate science to help humanity through a grieving process. But we are at a time in our movement where we need to be honest about these things

How should confronting that truth of climate change shape our actions?

First I think it is crucial that we don’t reinforce current power structures. I received a letter after my Powershift conference speech saying that I should be careful not to dismiss those in power, saying that the US Department of Defence is a great ally because they recognise the dangers of climate change and are acting to address it. I don’t care if the military is taking climate change seriously. But you can be sure they are not a group whose power I want to reinforce when things become ugly.

We can already see where the system has collapsed for economic or environmental reasons how power structures will respond. We saw this in Darfur where environmental catastrophe didn’t lead to everyone thinking, hey, this is clearly a sign that we must rethink how we live. Instead, it led to governing forces scapegoating certain groups, with deadly results. The greatest impact in Darfur was not the environmental catastrophe itself, but the response of those in power to it.

So in all our actions we need to look to overturn these power structures. We should not be asking major corporations like Walmart or institutions like the military to be kinder and gentler. We need to start working now on putting in place power structures that share our values as we enter difficult times. When things get ugly, and access to resources becomes difficult, we want to have trust that those making decisions will act justly, and not just favour the strong. This will mean allying now not with people at the top who have caused the crisis; but with people at the bottom, in particular those who have suffered from climate change.

We also need to stop being defensive against accusations that our demands will lead to damaging the economy. Mainstream green groups typically respond by talking about growth, green jobs, and the advantages for corporations of the green economy.

But I believe we should embrace the charges. No, we are not trying to disrupt the economy, but yes we do want to turn it upside down. We should not try and hide our vision about what we want to change, of the healthy, just world that we wish to create. We are not looking for small shifts: we want a radical overhaul of our economy and society. I think once we start talking about it, we will find more allies than we expect: trade unions, health workers, LGBT groups and so on.

Where do you think activists should invest their energies, locally or nationally?

In a hyper-individualised society, it is no surprise that climate action has been focused up to now on personal responsibility to limit consumption. We receive typically about three thousand adverts every day to consume, so green consumption bolsters that. The mentality is that the problem is one of individual and consumer habits, and that the answer to the climate crisis is lifestyle changes. This reinforces the idea that our primary identity is as a consumer, and reinforces a system that is the main problem. How can we recover and assert a system based on us as human beings rather than consumers?

A lot of us obviously start small-scale, local, in our social and environmental activities but we invariably come up against roadblocks imposed by the larger power structures. We can’t have a sustainable aspect of an unsustainable system. So we need to be clear from the outset that we want to change a larger system; to always challenge those roadblocks.

Do you maintain hope in this situation?

I have hope in the end in the ability of people to build a better world in the ashes of this one. I am not sure if that is a hopeful vision or not.

However, the future is not determined and we can still shape it. I was born the year Reagan took office, and grew up in a world where corporations were all-powerful and it was accepted there was nothing you could do to challenge them. Yet we have seen just this year in the Middle East, and in Wisconsin in the US, that people power is not an idealistic concept. It is the only thing that can bring about real change.

I know it will mean navigating the most intense period of change we have ever seen, but there is still a huge range in what our future could look like. That is why it is even more important to keep fighting.

Cancún calamity

James O'Nions — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 16:41:47 +0000

In the famous Hans Christian Anderson fable, The Emperor’s New Clothes, a weaver famously plays on an emperor’s arrogance and persuades him to wear a non-existent suit with the argument that it is only invisible to the ‘hopelessly stupid’. The moment of truth comes, as we can all remember, when a child in an otherwise silent crowd yells out, “But he is not wearing any clothes!” What we don’t always recall is that the naked Emperor suspects the child may be telling the truth, but carries on marching proudly and unclothed regardless.

The story is a rather apt parallel for the Cancún climate agreements that were signed last week. Only one dissenting nation, Bolivia, dared to voice its dissent with the agreement. Yet their voice was silenced by the gavel of the Chair and by the standing ovations of 191 countries. They, like the naked Emperor, must know that the deal is naked and without substance, yet they march on proudly regardless.

Cancún sets us on path to runaway climate change

Bolivia’s indefatigable negotiator, Pablo Solon, put it most cogently in the concluding plenary, when he said that the only way to assess whether the agreement had any ‘clothes’ was to see if it included firm commitments to reduce emissions and whether it was enough to prevent catastrophic climate change. The troubling reality, as he pointed out, is that the agreement merely confirms the completely inadequate voluntary pledges of reductions of 13-16 per cent by 2020 made since Copenhagen’s talks. Analysts at Climate Action Tracker have revealed that these paltry offers are nowhere near enough to keep temperature increases even within the contested goal of 2 degrees. Instead they would lead to increases in temperature of between 3 and 4 degrees, a level considered by scientists as highly dangerous for the vast majority of the planet. Solon said, “I can not in all in consciousness sign such as a document as millions of people will die as a result.”

To a stony silence from fellow country negotiators, Solon also pointed out a whole range of critical flaws in the agreement from its complete lack of specifics on key issues of finance to its systematic exclusion of voices from developing countries. As a press statement from Bolivia put it: “Proposals by powerful countries like the US were sacrosanct, while ours were disposable. Compromise was always at the expense of the victims, rather than the culprits of climate change.” Solon concluded that in substance the Cancún text was little more than a rehashed version of the Copenhagen Accord, that had been widely condemned the year before. Patricia Espinosa, chair of the talks, refused to open up any points of her draft text for negotiation and cheered on by other delegates made the legally dubious ruling that Bolivia’s opposition did not block consensus. The Cancún agreements were ‘approved’ to great celebration from the international community.

Cancún mood-music sways opinion

It became clear soon after the plenary ended, that what seemed like roars of support for the Cancún text, were more cries of relief or desperation. After the debacle in Copenhagen and following a probably deliberate policy by major powers who spoke constantly of ‘low expectations’, the mere existence of an agreement seemed enough. As Chris Huhne, UK climate secretary put it, “This is way better than what we were expecting only a few weeks ago.” The mood seemed to infect the larger non-governmental organisations who were gathered in Cancún. Greenpeace, who had labelled the almost identical Copenhagen Accord last year a “crime scene”, said that Cancún had put “hope over fear and put the building blocks back in place for a global deal to combat climate change.” Oxfam echoed, saying that “negotiators have resuscitated the UN talks and put them on a road to recovery.”

In the aftermath of Cancún, the main defence of the text has been based on appeals to realism. As Tom Athanasiou of Eco Equity puts it in his analysis on the Accord: “The reason that so many people are celebrating the Agreements is because they believe that, setting aside the details, they capture the only agreement that was possible.” Many environmentalists argue that at least with this accord and a reinvigorated belief in the UN, we live to fight another day. Meanwhile they warn that a collapse of negotiations in Cancún would perhaps have for ever destroyed the UN process and even the possibility of any future binding agreement on climate change. Nearly all use one of the favourite mantras of the negotiations, saying that critics should “not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

Realism of science, or realism of the powerful?

However this argument supposes two things: firstly that progress, even if small, was made at Cancún and secondly that it is better to have some kind of agreement than none at all. This reasoning along with both the financial offers, cajoling and bullying of the major powers – which was revealed most dramatically in wikileaks cables – is no doubt what drove most government negotiators to sign the Cancún texts. Yet both suppositions are highly questionable.

Firstly in terms of analysing progress, aside from the many other critiques of the texts, there is strong evidence that the Cancún agreements take us backwards rather than forwards. One of the key characteristics of the otherwise wholly insufficient Kyoto Protocol is that it had legally binding targets based, in theory, on the science. As we come up to the first deadline of 2012, seventeen nations will almost certainly breach their commitments to reduce emissions by 2020 by 5 per cent compared to 1990. Some nations like Canada, Australia, Turkey and Spain have instead vastly increased emissions. However the fact that they signed legally binding targets does open up the possibilities of legal challenges and a more effective incentive in future for countries to abide by their commitments.

By contrast, the Cancún agreement effectively kills off the Kyoto Protocol and replaces it with a pledge system of voluntary commitments. Not only does this lead to countries only offering what they plan to do anyway, ignoring what science demands; there is absolutely no possibility of legal penalties if a country fails to fulfil its commitments. It is an ineffective and highly dangerous way of tackling one of the biggest crises humanity has faced.

Will good be the enemy of the necessary?

The second questionable supposition is that any agreement is better than no agreement. This may be true for some international discussions on less critical issues, but is it for discussing a climate crisis where urgent and radical action is the only way to avert runaway climate change? As even supporters of the Cancún agreement note, the text has mainly punted off most difficult decisions to the next meeting of the UNFCCC in Durban, South Africa in December 2011. It already seems likely that we will see a repeat of the hype built up around Copenhagen and the equal likelihood of either a fudge or a failure – particularly if delegates can seem so easily sated by a few symbolic gestures such as the ones in Cancún.

Meanwhile the window of opportunity to act is closing. One report by the London School of Economics suggested that greenhouse gas emissions will have to peak by 2015 to have even a 50 per cent probability of keeping temperature increases below 1.5 degrees celsius – the demand made by over 100 developing nations. The Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change similarly identified 2015 as a time when emissions will have to peak to stabilise atmospheric CO2 at levels of 350 to 400 parts per million. Yet in the face of this, the best the world community can come up with is an agreement to continue negotiating? And we are happy to call that a success? As a side note, it can only be seen as deeply cynical that industrialised countries in Cancún agreed on 2015 as the date to review whether the global target should be 1.5 degrees rather than 2 degrees given that any action after that will almost certainly be too late.

The truth is that Cancún revealed a shocking failure by the world’s nations – and particularly those most responsible for causing climate change – to find a collective and effective response to a crisis that will affect the most vulnerable. A report by the Climate Vulnerable Forum, in December 2010 noted that already 350,000 people die from natural disasters related to climate change and that this figure is likely to rise to one million people every year if we don’t radically change course. Bolivia was not an obstacle to progress, it was rather the only nation daring enough to tell the truth. Perhaps if more nations – especially major emerging economies like India and Brazil – had said they would not accept an illusory deal, it could have shocked the world into moving beyond cautious approaches and acting radically for humanity and the planet.

Only mass mobilisation can shift power balance

The shift in thinking and action which is needed though, will only happen if we mobilise and on a scale that has never been done before. Bolivia’s bravery came to a large degree from the mandate it received at the World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change, and the support it felt from people on the streets just a few blocks from the negotiating halls. There thousands of indigenous people, smallholder farmers and grassroots activists marching on the streets were unequivocal in condemning the Cancún agreements and in supporting Bolivia. They already see the costs of climate change and were not prepared to be bought off with a deal that did nothing to safeguard their future. They were backed by climate justice networks worldwide. Yet the isolation of Bolivia in the conference plenary shows that this movement faces a huge challenge in the coming year to scale up. As Bill McKibben, founder of the global campaign 350.org, argues we need to “build a movement strong enough to take on the most profitable and powerful enterprise that the human civilization has ever seen – the fossil fuel industry” and we need to do it urgently before it is too late.

Cancún text summary: A backwards step

Document effectively kills of the only binding agreement, Kyoto Protocol, in favour of a completely inadequate bottom-up voluntary approach
Increases loopholes and flexibilities that allow developed countries to avoid action, via an expansion of offsets and continued existence of ‘surplus allowances’ of carbon after 2012 by countries like Ukraine and Russia which effectively cancel out any other reductions.
Finance Commitments weakened: commitment to “provide new and additional financial resources” to developing countries have been diluted to talking more vaguely about “mobilising [resources] jointly”, with expectation that this will mainly be provided by carbon markets
The World Bank is made trustee of the new Green Climate Fund, which has been strongly opposed by many civil society groups due to the undemocratic makeup of the Bank and its poor environmental record
No discussion of Intellectual Property rights, repeatedly raised by many countries, as current rules obstruct transfer of key climate-related technologies to developing countries
Constant assumption in favour of market mechanisms to resolve climate change even though this perspective is not shared by a number of countries, particularly in Latin America
Green light given for the controversial REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation) programme which often ends up perversely rewarding those responsible for deforestation, while dispossessing indigenous and forest dwellers of their land
Systematic exclusion of proposals that came from the historic World Peoples’ Conference on Climate Change including proposals for a Climate Justice Tribunal, full recognition of indigenous rights, and rights for nature.

This article was originally published by Red Pepper partner the Transnational Institute.

Free as in freedom

admin — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 12:01:15 +0000

There isn’t an eyepatch or hook in sight, but three young computer geeks and a businessman have suddenly made piracy very sexy in Sweden. The four founders of a popular file-sharing service called the Pirate Bay became instant underdog cyber-heroes as they took the stand in court in February against US media giants such as Sony and Warner Brothers. The four potentially face up to two years in prison and fines of up to $180,000 if they are found guilty of infringing copyright laws. The verdict is due in April.

Skull-and-crossbones flags fluttered outside the court, every utterance was blogged and twittered and new recruits flooded to the new Pirate Party, which now has more members than the Greens. The contentious website (www.piratebay.org) continues to taunt the music and film industry with insults and the spectre of lost profits as an estimated 22 million users swap files ranging from U2′s latest album to films such as Slumdog Millionaire.
The entertainment industry is keen to change the image of the Pirate Bay from one of cyber-freedom fighters to one of businessmen (albeit businessmen with unusual facial hair) profiting at the expense of artists. Monique Wadsted, the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) representative in Sweden, says file-sharing is simple theft: ‘It’s not a political trial or shutting down a people’s library or one that wants to prohibit file sharing as a technique. It’s a trial regarding four individuals that have conducted a big commercial business, making money out of others by file-sharing copy-protected works.’

Pirate Party founder Rickard Falkvinge sees it differently: ‘The problem is that politicians have chosen not to listen to young people. The music industry is doing everything to prevent the spread of culture. In Sweden we are putting a flag in the ground and uniting to put an end to their lobbying.’

Students for free culture

Sweden isn’t the only place where flags are being put in the ground. A couple of months previously, on the opposite side of the globe, Students for Free Culture held their first national meeting in Berkeley. They consciously chose to hold the meeting at the US university that became renowned for launching the Free Speech Movement, which campaigned against a ban on political activities on campus and sparked a subsequent nationwide wave of student activism in the 1960s.

Students for Free Culture was started by two students in Pennsylvania who received legal threats in 2003 from electronic voting machine manufacturer Diebold for publishing embarrassing internal company emails that revealed serious flaws in its e-voting systems. Diebold was already at the centre of controversy over alleged voting irregularities and its links to the Republicans.
Rather than backing down, the students organised to get the emails published on even more websites and counter-sued the company for abuse of copyright law. The political and media attention forced Diebold to cave in.

‘Like the Free Speech Movement, we are fighting against the top-down control of speech and are motivated by beliefs about basic rights. The differences are in our ability to organise electronically – our Mario Savio [one of the leaders of the Free Speech Movement] is more likely to inspire with a blog post than with a speech,’ says Berkeley student Alex Kozak, one of the organisers.

The national meeting at Berkeley – billed as an ‘unconference’ – committed itself to fight for open access to university research and the use of free and open software within universities, and to push for free licensing of any university patents related to health or software. It also promised to continue to pick fights with any attempts to control the open nature of the internet and to take on corporations that try to quash artistic creativity and free speech with lawsuits.

Mayo Fuster Morell, a Catalan activist and researcher on digital issues, believes that ‘the movement has a high level of commitment and clear ideas. It is not possible to reverse what they want to do. The goal of universal access to knowledge is hugely motivating and linked with other social movements will have a huge impact.’

Growing up digital

Throughout the world, the experience of ‘growing up digital’, as technology writer Don Tapscott calls it, has created a pattern of behaviour and cooperation that undermines corporate control of culture, without even necessarily meaning to. ‘It is part of the identity of my generation to create and share content on large social networks, organise events online and share with each other our favourite music and movies, sometimes legally and sometimes not,’ says Alex Kozak. ‘This behaviour has lead to an unconscious dedication to the culture of sharing.’

Sharing albums via the internet or in person, editing music and TV footage for YouTube videos or mixing tracks to produce one’s own music is part of the everyday experience of most young people. The internet has also facilitated the emergence of communities that have the tools to collaborate across borders and produce software, music and films that previously could only be made by resource-rich corporations. This has created a burgeoning movement of free software and open source technicians, independent media activists and creative artists and writers.

Certainly not all elements of this burgeoning movement are political, and libertarian attitudes are just as likely to be found on the right as on the left. Nevertheless, it is clear that the experience of growing up digital is starting to politicise young people, who take pride in the collaborative models that they are developing and are determined to defend them when they are threatened.

Corporate backlash

Inadvertently, corporations are intensifying this politicisation when they desperately try to limit the culture of sharing. In addition to its frequent attempts to close down file-sharing sites such as the Pirate Bay (and Napster before it), the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has sued more than 30,000 randomly selected US families for music file-sharing in the last five years. And these legal actions are likely to continue. As corporations’ possibilities for increasing profit diminish at a time of recession and against a systemic capitalist tendency for overproduction, patents are one of the few mechanisms that insulate companies from competition and keep prices high for their branded products (whether they are music albums or Microsoft software).

The cultural industry is one of the largest and most profitable in the developed world, especially in the US and Japan. Four companies control 70 per cent of the world’s music market. Copyright industries in the US have typically outperformed other industries, contributing as much as 24 per cent of overall economic growth in 2007. These corporations usually don’t produce the content and tend not to employ creative producers directly, but rather identify and invest in a small number of artists who can create the most value. They concentrate on licensing: maintaining the maximum length of control of the ‘intellectual property’ and exercising these rights in as many arenas as possible (film, TV, dvds, merchandise).

Corporations are not willing to let go of this control easily. Apart from legal threats, companies benefit from the corporate control of access to the internet and corporate ownership of popular ‘sharing’ sites like YouTube. In January 2009, they succeeded in pressurising Eircom in Ireland to become the first internet service provider to block access to all file-sharing content, and they undoubtedly hope to pressure other ISPs to follow suit.

They have backed this up with pressure to change the law in many countries. Where the corporations don’t have sufficient influence on domestic politicians, they have used the arsenal of regional free trade agreements and even blunt diplomatic threats to impose stricter intellectual property regimes and to target file-sharing sites. The first attempt to close down the Pirate Bay was in 2006, when Swedish police confiscated servers. It took place after threats from the US embassy against the Swedish government.

Mark Getty of Getty Images – one of the largest owners of copyrighted materials – once said: ‘Intellectual property is the oil of the 21st century.’ Digital activists took this to mean that corporations, and countries like the US, would be willing to go to legal and, who knows, maybe even literal war to protect and control it.

Losing control

Despite their best efforts, there is a sense that the corporations face an impossible task in trying to put free culture back into a safe pre-digital box. Felix Stalder, media researcher at Zurich University, says: ‘I think the war on piracy is failing for social reasons. People like to communicate, to share things, to transform things, and technology makes it so easy that there is no way of stopping it.’

The Pirate Party’s Richard Falkvinge compares the fight to the attempts by the church to control information and culture in the Middle Ages. ’15 years ago we had one source communicating to the many, like a newspaper or TV station. Today, however, with the internet, millions of people are exchanging culture and information, so there is no way of controlling this information.’
Pirate Bay’s founders have said that regardless of the trial’s outcome Pirate Bay will continue to exist, as it is now set up on servers across the world in such a way that even the owners don’t know where they are.

Notably, Getty Images was sold in 2008 after its stock prices plunged with the rapid rise of cheaper and open-access images on the web. In January 2009, Apple announced it would remove anti-copying restrictions (known as digital rights management) on all of the songs in its popular iTunes store.
Most significant, perhaps, are the strong alternatives and new models of knowledge-sharing that are emerging as cracks appear in the weakening structure of intellectual property. In the digital world, free and open source applications such as the Firefox browser and OpenOffice suite are taking off as alternatives to Microsoft programs. The collaborative and free-to-use internet encyclopaedia Wikipedia is now the fourth most popular website worldwide (after Google, Yahoo and MSN). An increasing number of projects are now carried out collectively and collaboratively across the internet. Bands such as Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails have shown that bypassing corporate media companies and allowing people to pay what they want to download an album can still ensure that artists get rewarded for their creative work.

Creativity shows no signs of being squashed by the decline in profits of companies like Sony music. More than 130 million works by writers, photographers, and film producers have been released with Creative Commons licences, which are designed to make it easier for people to share and build upon the work of others. German activist Sebastian Lütgert, from do-it-yourself squatter-cinema group Pirate Cinema, believes that ‘what we are witnessing is the coming of producers rather than consumers, and that suggests a new economic model for society.’

In practical terms, researcher Dorothy Kidd notes that ‘the open source software movement offers a good model for how decentralised network structures can work. It is an example that contradicts the ideology that says that public institutions are not flexible and dynamic enough to work.’ She believes that these practices need to be incorporated into social movements’ practices and their articulation of alternatives.

There will be challenges in doing this – and it is important not to over-romanticise developments like the free and open source software movements. Jeff Juris, an analyst on new media technologies and social movements, says: ‘Open source movements can still replicate hierarchies seen in traditional systems. This time the divisions are not just around the usual issues of power and money, but also based on a divide between “techies” and “activists”.’

Others note that open source models and corporate power are not mutually exclusive, citing the prominent role of IT company Sun Microsystems in projects such as OpenOffice. Collaborative models have the potential to flatten hierarchies and weaken corporate power, but this still requires a firm political commitment from the participants.

In an interview carried out by the digital magazine Wired with one of Pirate Bay’s collaborators, Pete (surname undisclosed) tells the reporter: ‘It’s not the problem of the pirates to figure out how to compensate artists or encourage invention away from the current intellectual property system … Our job is just to tear down the flawed system that exists, to force the hand of society to make something better.’ Therein lies the challenge for social movements and activists to take the redefinition of piracy a stage further – to turn the image of a pirate from an eye-patched destroyer to one of a digitally-inspired pioneer, determined to use creativity to build new collaborative and just economic and social models of living.

This article is based on conversations, papers and web links pulled together at the Networked Politics and Technology seminar at Berkeley
www.networked-politics.info/berkeley

Searching for Che

admin — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 18:14:40 +0000

There he was at my first political event in Latin America. The famous blacked out graphic image of a handsome face on endless flags, T-shirts, banners. Che Guevara, the most loved and remembered revolutionary of Latin America. And he has accompanied me ever since, most of all in Bolivia. At political meetings, next to the altar in the front of a church once, on the wall of many MAS government politicians (including of President Evo Morales), in lyrics of songs played in cafes and bars. Outside Latin America, he also continues to flourish not just on scuffed student walls but even on the body of Prince Harry and the albums of Madonna.

Meanwhile, for me, born five years after Che Guevara died in a backwater of Bolivia, Che has remained an illusive hero, a mythical figure that I have never fully identified with. Curiosity has driven me to read and enjoy the motorcycle diaries, to scan most of a long biography by Jon Anderson one summer, and to brave his rather depressing diaries in Spanish recounting his final days as a guerilla in Bolivia.

I identified with the traveller and the internationalist. I admired the rebel and his commitment to live out his principles. I liked some of his quotes, such as ‘Any person who on seeing injustice trembles with indignation is a comrade.’ But I have still failed to understand the Che Guevara myth. Why does one man have such an impact and remain such a model for social movements today?

So, on the 40th anniversary of his death, I headed to Che Guevara’s deathplace in Bolivia to try to understand his abiding appeal.

Disconnected

En route, I decided it was time to read more about his ideas, so delved into the famous Notes for the Study of Man and Socialism in Cuba written, perhaps, on the back of an envelope whilst in Africa. The attempt to place greater emphasis on individuals’ consciousness for creating a revolutionary and just society as opposed to watching the playing out of immoveable historical forces was a more attractive reading of Marx for me. However large parts of the essay, especially those that referred to the role of vanguard parties and movements guiding the masses, failed to connect and seemed arrogant. Most of all there was nothing that referred to the indigenous worldviews so important in Bolivia, or which even obliquely addressed the environmental crisis or over-consumption. In fact, Che was clearly an unadulterated admirer of development and industrialisation without limits.

It is obviously rather too much to expect past revolutionaries, even Che, to predict and address the future with his proposals. But a similar disconnect seemed to take place when Che Guevara was in Bolivia in 1967. For a known writer on guerilla warfare tactics, his guerilla fight was spectacularly badly managed and carried out in a region unlikely to become the springboard for a revolution. This became apparent arriving in Vallegrande even today.

Vallegrande is a small sleepy conservative town, off the main road with little traffic, cobbled streets and unlike many Bolivian cities apparently unmarred by crime. Many houses, which occasionally gave peeks of courtyards decked with flowers, had their doors open or covered by a simple latch. According to German Urquidi, a Vallegrandino (as they are known), people in the town still use antiquated Spanish for some expressions, sounding like figures in a Cervantes novel.

On the tourist map

Arriving at our hotel off the central square, the amiable mother-like Doña Ignacia sported a good range of Che posters in the reception. She said like everyone in the town that she had seen Che’s body when it was shown in the hospital laundry. But when I asked if she admired Che, she said not really but that she was grateful to him because ‘Che put Vallegrande on the tourist map. Thanks to his death, lots of people come to visit and I get an income.’

I am not sure Che Guevara would have been happy that his death had become an opportunity for private profit. However her views were probably shared by the mayor, who was conspicuously absent from the Che Guevara celebrations, no doubt because he is a representative of Podemos, the right-wing party fiercely opposed to Evo Morales and the MAS government. Che’s very visible legacy had clearly failed to radicalise this town.

Heading out for the dusty bumpy ride into the mountains to La Higuera confirmed the impression. Beyond the plethora of Che Guevara busts and grafitti in the centre of the village, campesinos were working as usual on the anniversary of Che’s death, walking with donkeys laden with potatoes back from the fields. A few watched impassively as international Chetistas emotionally held a ceremony to mark Che Guevara’s death. Their lack of engagement seemed a reflection of the hostility and suspicion that Che Guevara wrote about in his diaries forty years ago.

The pertinent question my partner raised was: ‘Do you think these campesinos need liberation?’ For, strangely, Che Guevara had chosen a region in Bolivia where there was little inequality of land distribution and where campesinos had calmly worked the soil for thousands of years regardless of regimes in power. When the CIA-trained soldiers came in 1967 to hunt down Che and told the campesinos that Cubans were invading the country and wanted to take away their land, it is not surprising that no one responded to Che Guevara’s call. Nor that a campesino from La Higuera spotting the guerillas one early dawn morning as he watered his potatoes would head to the garrison near La Higuera and become the Judas of the Guevara gospel.

Ethically pure

Back in Vallegrande at the Second International Meeting for Che Guevara there were no such doubts. Bolivians along with people from all over the continent had gathered to listen to stories about Che, commemorate his life and discuss his ideas. The meeting with Leonard Tamayo (nicknamed Urbano), a short stout Cuban guerilla who fought with Che in Bolivia, was packed with people sitting on the floor beside some lurid painted portraits of Che.

The speech suggested too much military training full of dates and routes. But there was the occasional anecdote to enliven the crowd, such as the story of how Urbano mistakenly took the wrong flight to Bolivia and ended up in transit via New York. When he confessed his mistake Che laughed it off, saying ‘in the empire it seems that even an elephant in disguise can get past’.

What Urbano and fellow guerilla Rogelio Acevedo held up as Che’s special qualities were his passion, his ability to lead by example and his sacrifice. In tough times, they no doubt had seen his weak and egotistical sides but, in remembering, their words were only ones of praise. Urbano even went as far as to say that Che was ‘ethically totally pure, a paradigm of what a revolutionary should be like. If he had any faults it was that he was too humane.’

The idea of the perfect sinless man also seems to have infiltrated the otherwise conservative town. Doña Ignacia suggested talking to two elderly sisters who she said were great fans of Che. Knocking on the door I was soon invited into a spotless living room in an old adobe house, our conversation overlooked by a photo of Che on one wall and a cutesy image of Jesus with lambs on the other.

Face of Christ

As they recounted seeing his dead body and their growing interest in Che, the sisters, Anna and Lehia bickered with the familiarity and love built from years together. They couldn’t agree on the colour of his boots and trousers, but they both agreed that he didn’t look dead when they saw him. Anna said he had the ‘face of Christ’ and that she imagined him as her son; Lehia that his legs were untouched by insects despite months in the jungle.

Both had been impacted by the experience and started to find out more about why he died. Lehia showed a well-fingered book of texts by Che with a list of words she had carefully written out and admitted she didn’t fully understand: multilaterality, sectarianism, alienation … They admired his stand against inequality, poverty and injustice and the way he lived what he preached. They were among the first to go to his grave on his fifth anniversary. On the 30th they helped organise a big gathering.

They talked of many houses where a picture of Che was on the altar and prayed to. Forty years on they were getting too old to attend all the events, but celebrated the growing interest in Che and the fact that he chose Vallegrande, ‘the most beautiful region of Bolivia’, to fight his last days.

Yet, while intriguing, none of these encounters made me feel closer to understanding the Che phenomenon. In fact turning him into a secular saint made him feel more unreal.

Guevaristas and revolutionaries

That afternoon, I headed to the airfield where his body was finally uncovered in 1997, 30 years after his death. With a strong wind streaming against the Guevara banners and flags, a mixture of campesinos, indigenous people and international activists gathered to listen to various speakers, including President Evo Morales. In the run-up to the anniversary, there had been strong criticism from the right and some in the army for glorifying an invader who killed Bolivians. Morales, a coca-growing leader who faced years of repression from the state and US-backed forces, was unabashed in his defence of Che. To big cheers, he declared: ‘We are not ashamed or have anything to hide. We are guevaristas and we are revolutionaries.’

It is not clear what Che would have made of Morales’ projects that he proclaimed as legacies of Che’s spirit. Morales’ nationalisation has not meant throwing out multinational companies but negotiating better deals. His land reform has only included distribution of unproductive land, leaving large tracts still in the hands of rich landowners.

Yet it was becoming clear by now that Che’s power was not in the application of his ideas but the symbolism of his example in a continent that remains besieged by injustice and US domination. Morales’ party includes several people who were imprisoned for guerilla activity including the vice president Alvaro Garcia Linera. Across the continent most social movements have embraced Che for his example of fighting relentlessly against injustice and imperialism.

Among them were Gentil Chauto from the Landless Movement in Brazil, who had travelled three days by land to get to Vallegrande. He said Che was a symbol for the movement of the ‘kind of person we need to follow’. Gentil’s disappointment with President Lula of Brazil reminded me that cutting short Che Guevara’s life enabled him to become the faultless hero because there was no time in which he either made unacceptable compromises, such as Lula, went to extremes, such as Mao and Stalin, or got the mixed reaction that Cuba and Fidel receive even from those on the left.

The importance of Che

But perhaps the most striking example of the symbolic power of Che was evident in the very hospital of Vallegrande where Che’s body was laid out to view. Just behind it today is a clinic now populated by 26 Cuban staff providing free health care to the community. The health programme was supported in a Bolivarian initiative and accord between Venezuela, Cuba and Bolivia. What Che was unable to do as a guerilla was now being carried out peacefully, it seemed.

Carmen, a Cuban nurse, certainly felt that Che’s dream was being realised. ‘Just imagine if he saw this. It shows his death was not in vain.’ Working seven days a week with hardly a break and far from her family, she said she gets her ‘force from the Comandante’.

Her two Cuban companions, Julio and Norma from Santa Clara in Cuba, a city Che famously liberated, added: ‘Che said you should give yourself to others, that is what we are doing, living out the legacy of Che.’ I couldn’t help feeling the force that his example had in driving their visible personal commitment to working for the health of Bolivians thousands of miles from their home.

I left Vallegrande aware of the importance of Che Guevara as a symbol and an inspiration in social movements fighting in different ways for a just society. But it was a week later that the image of Che really struck home.

I was accompanying a march to the US embassy in La Paz led by families of 67 people killed as a result of orders by ex-president Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada in October 2003. Suddenly a group of residents from El Alto came down with a coffin of Eulogio Samo, who had died the previous day as a result of injuries suffered in 2003. The anger was palpable as they stormed up to the gates and doors and shouted ‘Justicia, Justicia’. The US embassy, a Stalinist-looking building, stood cold and silent – as does the US administration, which has refused to support the extradition of Goni and protects him from justice.

It brought home to me the continued and very real presence of US imperialism in Latin America and its grooming of leaders like Goni, who grew up in the US and went to the infamously neoliberal Chicago University. The US supported his policies of privatisation and has since offered him protection, giving him refuge in Maryland when the Bolivian people rose up and kicked him out of government. In the background of the march, I saw a flag of Che waving. Away from words, discourse and semi-religious worship, but instead witnessing a current struggle against imperialism, Che suddenly made sense.

Nick Buxton\’s blog

Nick Buxton\’s photos from Bolivia