Trinidad: Chief Asks How Does Removing Columbus Statue Improve First Peoples?

Reproduced from Stabroek News, June 15, 2020

Defaced: Red paint is splattered on the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Square, corner of Independence Square and Duncan Street, Port of Spain.

Don’t kill Christopher Columbus a second time just for killing sake.

It will not do the First Peoples any good unless it’s accompanied by tangible measures to advance the indigenous people of Trinidad and Tobago.

So said Chief of the Santa Rosa First Peoples Community, Ricardo Bharath.

“We want to kill Columbus a second time and it doesn’t do one blooming thing for us,” Bharath told the Express yesterday.

His position comes even as another indigenous group, supported by the Emancipation Support Committee (ESC) through its Cross Rhodes Freedom Project, is making a call for the removal of Columbus’ statue in Port of Spain.

Bharath said he was invited by the ESC to make a statement at a recent indigenous ritual ceremony where the call for the removal of Columbus’ statue was made.

He said he made his position clear but it was drowned out.

Bharath said there remain several issues relating to the First Peoples which have not been addressed.

He said indigenous people of T&T were the ones most affected by the coming of Columbus in 1498.

He said it was 200 years after Columbus came, however, that the Spanish authorities began the decimation of the First Peoples.

“They forced them to give up their religion and their language. If they did not accept the new religion, they were sometimes put to death. Some of them fled and killed themselves,” he said.

“You hear about so many suicide points around the country. Many accepted the new religion because they did not want to face death or starvation.”

Bharath said only a fraction of the First Peoples remain today, most of them having intermarried.

Leader of another indigenous group, Queen of the Warao Nation, Donna Bermudez-Bovell, last week called on Port of Spain Mayor Joel Martinez to remove the statue of Columbus from Columbus Square and replace it with an indigenous freedom fighter.

The Warao Nation and the ESC have begun an online petition for support and thousands have responded.

Their calls to remove Columbus and other “racist” monuments comes after the removal of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Britain by Black Lives Matter protesters.

But Bharath cleared the air on the Santa Rosa First Peoples community’s position on the matter.

“I am not a Columbus fighter saying his statue must remain and neither am I asking for its removal,” he said yesterday.

“How does the removal of Columbus’ statue improve the lives and the plight of the descendants of the First Peoples today?

“If it is just removing Columbus’ statue for the sake of removing it, I see no benefit and no merit. The removal must be replaced with something significant to advance our cause today.

“And if that cannot be done, it’s a waste of time in fighting for the removal of a statue. What is done is done. By removing Columbus’ statue we cannot undo the past.”

Bharath said they have already presented a model of a monument to a government committee concerning the removal of the bones of indigenous peoples during excavation works in the restoration of the Red House.

He claimed funding has been the cause of the keep back in the setting up of this monument, which comprises an indigenous figure and remains of the First Peoples.

The Red House, site of Parliament, is a colonial relic allegedly constructed on a burial site of indigenous peoples.

Bharath listed some present and ongoing issues affecting the First Peoples of Trinidad and Tobago.

He said even though the descendants of indigenous people were considered a small group, they want a political voice, both at the local and central government levels.

He said they were promised assistance to establish an Amerindian village in Blanchissuesse and, to date, were still struggling with this with a small UNESCO grant.

“There are funds in the Public Sector Investment Programme for this but nobody seems to be able to get this out.

“We have land issues. There are areas we would like to see protected which are now being destroyed by quarrying.

“If none of those things can’t be done, I don’t see what is the fuss about this Columbus statue,” he said.

Pearls, Grenada: Histories of Resistance by an Old Runway

A view out toward the sea, from the beach at the end of the runway in Pearls, Grenada

Pearls, in the Parish of St. Andrew’s, Grenada, just up the road from the main town of Grenville, is a unique place that sits at the intersection of two of the main themes of my research career: the cultures and histories of Indigenous Peoples of the Caribbean, and the political economy of US imperialist interventions. Both of these strands come together, in one specific spot: the old runway—still very much intact—at what was once Pearls Airport. The airport is the subject of the short photo essay contained in the article titled, "Pearls before Swine," from which the following sections were extracted.

Aerial view of the runway at the old airport in Pearls.

....The old runway at Pearls is a place that is barely frequented by tourists; there were only two young American ladies doing a self-guided tour when we were there, but then again we were there during low season. On local tourist maps the image of the runway is accompanied by a label boasting of “Amerindian Sites,” except there is no museum in the vicinity, nor any tours or tour guides to take one to see these “sites”. The two American women we met were totally mystified by this apparent absence, and they had asked everyone they encountered, as we had, about where they were to go to see the Amerindian artifacts. None of the locals could (or would) give an answer.

What we did not realize, at least not at first, is that we were standing right on top of the artifacts: they were spread all around the borders of the runway, and in the heaps of soil piled up at the end of the runway by the beach, where British bulldozers pushed the soil when clearing land for the tarmac.

That then is the other, older history of Pearls: it was once a major Amerindian port, possibly the largest of its kind, connecting Indigenous communities spread across the Lesser Antilles. Some historians have described it as “the most important archaeological site in the Caribbean”. Pearls had been occupied for at least seven centuries, from 300 BC to 400 AD. Trinidad, just 80 miles to the south, and much larger, has nothing like Pearls in terms of the broad expanse of Amerindian artifacts covering such a large area, with always more artifacts being uncovered at Pearls. I am not aware of the remnants of any “Amerindian port” in all of Trinidad, or Tobago for that matter.

The runway ends just feet from a long and wild beach, not the kind which would normally attract swimmers. The waters are pretty rough, with waves coming in fast and furious, from all angles. The humid air is thick with sea salt. The beach is “littered” with gorgeous pieces of sun-bleached driftwood. The beach shows a few signs of being used by locals for liming purposes: a small amount of discarded soft drink bottles, for example....

....what is also buried in Pearls is the Amerindian side of what could have been. Amerindian Grenada was a proud place, which for over 150 years—think of that astounding number—successfully drove off colonizing efforts by the British and French, and preserved Grenada as a Caribbean bastion of Indigenous freedom. It is a history that is both awesome and inspiring. In those encounters with the military superpowers of the time, Grenada was utterly victorious. This is one of the reasons I call the Caribs the original anti-imperialists of the modern world-system.

Amerindian Grenada was a green place of beauty, of people who knew how to live the good life and enjoy the free bounties of nature. Grenada is of course still ultra green, and Grenadians show all signs of knowing how to enjoy the good life regardless of any strife or troubles. Yet Amerindian Grenada was something different: their society was one without schools, prisons, offices, army bases, plantations, slavery, or money. Theirs was the peace to which we all claim to strive, but pretend to be unable to achieve, buried under mountains of corruption, addictions to all manner of artifice, and constrained by the daily authoritarianism that dominates our lives.

In terms of preserving or at least acknowledging the Amerindian past, it is true that the Grenada National Museum (the subject of essays to come), has made some efforts to advance local knowledge of Pearls’ Indigenous heritage, with special archaeological field trips for local schoolchildren, assisted by the incredible Michael John. Michael John, himself from Pearls, is a self-made archaeologist, with an apparently natural talent for spotting Amerindian artifacts. He is a man who is very likely of Carib descent and who also makes a living carving stone objects that look much like those one normally finds buried in the ground, those carved by his likely ancestors.

On the whole, however, what is being done to preserve and protect the memory of the Amerindians is far too little. Amerindian history is sometimes looted by tourists, some of whom possibly do not know that it is against the law to remove artifacts—but then again, nobody is enforcing the law. Suitcases and other travel items are not checked by the authorities when one flies out of Grenada, as they ought to be in all cases. Locals who claim to know nothing about “Amerindian sites” in the vicinity of the Pearls runway may be performing a very valuable service.

Yurumein (Homeland): A Documentary on Caribs in St. Vincent

YURUMEIN: film trailer from Andrea Leland on Vimeo.

Originally published on H-Caribbean, June 2014

(Director) Andrea E. Leland. Yurumein (Homeland). January 2014. 50-minute documentary / DVD format / 4:3 aspect ratio / surround sound.

Resistance, Rupture, and Repair: The Story of the Caribs of St. Vincent in the Caribbean

 

Yurumein by Andrea E. Leland effectively begins twice: first it begins in St. Vincent, and then, as a reflection of the contemporary relocation of the Garifuna, it begins again in Los Angeles, which probably has the largest number of Garifuna people outside of Central America and the Caribbean. The core of the film ostensibly follows the journey of Cadrin Gill, a Los Angeles family doctor, who self-identifies as Carib and who was born in Sandy Bay, St. Vincent, one of the residential areas of the island that contains a sizeable Carib population. Focusing on the reclamation of pride in Carib identity, and the beginnings of a cultural resurgence that happens in part as a transnational process of reconnecting indigenous communities in the Caribbean region (in this case the relinking of Honduran Garifuna and Vincentian Caribs), this film serves as an important document of the contemporary presence of indigeneity in the Caribbean. The film thus helps to fill in the map of indigenous cultural resurgence in the Caribbean, of indigenous communities that did not simply vanish due to European colonization, but that resisted and repaired what they could. In this sense the documentary helps to further challenge centuries of writings, and even modern historiography, whose emphases have been Carib decline and extinction. In addition, as there has been so little produced, whether in film or in writing, about the Caribs/Gairfuna of St. Vincent, apart from the occasional thesis or conference paper offered within regional institutions, this film further serves to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.

Yurumein represents part of a growing series of films on indigenous Caribbean topics, but is unique as one that focuses on St. Vincent. As a contribution to documentaries about the indigenous Caribbean, this film joins Last of the Karaphuna (Philip Thorneycroft Teuscher, 1983, focusing on the Dominica Carib Reserve); Caribbean Eye: Indigenous Survivors (UNESCO/Banyan, 1991, focusing on contemporary indigenous communities in Guyana, Trinidad, Dominica, and St. Vincent); The Garifuna Journey (also by Andrea Leland, 1998, focusing on Belize); The Quest of the Carib Canoe (Eugene Jarecki, 2000, focusing primarily on Dominica’s Caribs, but also bringing special attention to Trinidad and Guyana); Three Kings of Belize (Katia Paradis, 2007, focusing on Belize, including a focus on a Garifuna musician); and The Amerindians (Tracy Assing, 2010, focusing on Trinidad’s Carib Community).

“That paradigm has changed,” Dr. Gills says in the film, a change in paradigm that involves increased recognition of “our history and our heritage.” It is an important point, as he adds that this has happened “only recently.” Indeed, we are now in the third decade of a region-wide indigenous resurgence in the Caribbean, one that arguably began at least on a formal, organizational level in St. Vincent itself in 1987, with a conference on the indigenous peoples of the region that would later result in the formation of the Caribbean Organization of Indigenous Peoples (COIP), whose first president was the Belizean Garifuna anthropologist Dr. Joseph Palacio.[1] (Coincidentally, in my own research context in Arima, Trinidad, 1987 was the first year that Trinidad’s Carib Community received delegates from seven different Guyanese indigenous tribes.[2])

On a local level in St. Vincent, this paradigm change has also occurred. “We were brought up as Englishmen, so we had an English mentality,” Dr. Gill explains, “and consequently there was not much knowledge about my history…. [I]n my days, it was not ‘fashionable’ to be called ‘Carib.’” Echoing what I found in my research in Trinidad, the film presents a series of individuals in Sandy Bay who explain that they did not know of their Carib ancestry until they reached adulthood, while others did know and could not hide it and were thus targeted for discrimination in the wider society as “ignorant,” “backward,” “warlike” and “cannibal” people, leading some to suppress their own identification as Carib. (Unfortunately, this juxtaposition of lack of self-awareness as Carib, while the wider society discriminates against them as Carib, is a paradox left unexplored in the film.) While there is now a positive acknowledgment of their ancestral ties (and explaining why this has happened recently exceeds both the scope of the film and this review), Caribs in this film also reflect on what they say is their own lack of personal knowledge of Carib history and language. While they point to a number of surviving traditions, such as the making of cassava bread (which one woman claims, without much credibility, to have learned to do all on her own), it is clear that the identity is also understood in racial terms, with a not infrequent reference in the film to phenotypical markers, specifically dealing with one’s face and one’s hair. The kind of racialization that historically distinguished the Caribs of northern St. Vincent, especially in the towns of Orange Hill, Oven Land, Sandy Bay, Point, Owia, and Fancy, from the Garifuna or “Black Carib” of the southern town of Greggs (which is never mentioned in this film), is not confronted in this film. Indeed, the seemingly inexplicable adoption of “Garifuna” for all Carib descendants was one of the surprising things I learned from this film, and as a local historian explains, this is “relatively new” (but we are not informed as to why it has happened).

On an international level, the film speaks of examples where Caribs today are still stereotyped as “wild cannibals” in a few yet influential quarters. Here the film showcases Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean (2003- ) as one of the latest examples of this malignant stereotyping. Those presented in this documentary explicitly comment on their task as one of combating the influence of Hollywood.

What “loss” means, what constitutes “knowledge,” and knowledge of loss, are all difficult questions that the film brushes against on occasion. If the Vincentian Caribs do not know what “was” their culture, how do they know what was “lost”? Rather than risk diving into and drowning in an essentialist exercise of trait-listing, I prefer the formulation of the New Zealand anthropologist Steven Webster, who argues that “Maori culture is not something that has been lost, it is the loss; being ‘a Maori’ is struggling to be a Maori.”[3] There is more to this however, as some knowledge of what it means to be “Carib,” that is actually in line with its original political meaning in the first century of European imperial invasions, is knowledge that persists. As Odette Sutherland, a Vincentian Carib, says in the film: “They were rebellious people. They didn’t want to work as slaves. The Caribs always liked to be independent and work to help themselves and their family,” then adding as she continues working in her yard, “I am proud to say that I am a Carib.” Another person declares: “That is our king … the chief of the Caribs … Joseph Chatoyer. He fight for the Carib country.” Cadrin Gill expands on this theme of resistance in remarking that during colonial rule in the Caribbean, “St. Vincent was the mecca of freedom,” where escaped slaves from nearby territories often sought refuge and were welcomed by the Caribs. This historical knowledge, of the Caribs as the original anti-imperialists of the modern world system, is further attested to in a dramatic fashion, on display for tourists and all visitors, at Fort Charlotte. There a sign states, “built by the British as the chief defence against the indigenous people and their allies,” and all of the cannons are pointing not out to sea, but inland. (It is also possible that the message of anti-imperialism is simultaneously lost by being displaced into talk of centuries past, focusing on the British, as Dr. Gill does not seem conflicted about displaying a portrait of Barack Obama behind his desk.)

One of the unresolved tensions in this film is that of claiming lack of knowledge on the one hand, yet currently producing knowledge of contemporary Caribness that in some senses accords with the original political content of the identification. Colin Sam, Gill’s nephew, repeats the complaint of a lack of cultural knowledge of self. Yet he and his fellow Caribs clearly know a great deal, but it is not formatted, packaged, and labeled in the same way that academics produce cultural history in writing. Hence, rather than a detailed report produced by an archaeologist, in this film we have: “the Caribs were here ever since.” It is simple, perhaps, but it is also an understanding that is necessary for any sense of indigeneity. In addition, among those speaking in the film is Nixon Lewis, a Carib researcher who spends his spare time doing archival research during annual trips to London, and when not there, then being “on the Net all the time.”

Further adding weight to the idea of a paradigm shift are the words of the prime minister of St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Ralph Gonsalves, who in speaking of the brutality of British rule declares: “let us not mince words: genocide by the British.” What is significant is the occasion on which these words were spoken: National Hero’s Day—an annual public commemoration of Joseph Chatoyer, a long sought-after national holiday first demanded by the Committee for the Development of the Carib Community (CDCC), an organization not mentioned in this film.[4] Demands for such a commemoration were rejected by the government for numerous years. In one scene of the film, we can barely make out a banner in the background on which these words are painted: “Indigenous People’s Day Rally.” Indigenous People’s Day is another of those events that Sherelene Roberts explained the CDCC had long pursued.

Some shortcomings of this film should also be noted, aside from some of the gaps and silences noted above. We are told that 2 percent of St. Vincent’s 120,000 people are Caribs, but the source for this not indicated, nor is the deeply problematic issue of counting such a contested and suppressed identity considered. Moreover, Roberts reported a figure of 3.1 percent reporting themselves as Carib during the 1991 Population Census.[5] The film might then lead some to believe that there has been a decline since then. The film also reports that there are a total of 400,000 Garifuna in the United States, Central America, and Caribbean combined, which is a very significant size (again, a source would have been useful). Aside from these points, there is no debate in the film about the problems with attempting to phenotypically define Caribness by the quality of one’s hair, and whether this could mean an implicit rejection of one’s Africanness. The film in fact generally ignores the African dimension of Garifuna identity and history (even when some of the traditions being taught by Honduran Garifunas to their Vincentian hosts are creole Afro-Caribbean ones). The fact that a largely African-descended population is the only population in the region to have kept the Island Carib language alive is surely one of the most spectacular stories of Caribbean history, and a key sign of trouble for any attempts to racialize indigeneity or to distill it out of larger processes of creolization. There is also no discussion in the film about the relations between Garifuna/Caribs and the national government. We hear Prime Minister Gonsalves delivering a stirring speech about British genocide against the Caribs, but then the film ends by pointing out that the Vincentian island of Balliceaux, where the Garifuna were imprisoned in 1795 before their exile to Honduras, rather than being safeguarded as land the Garifuna consider to be sacred has instead been put up for sale to private buyers. Also in the context of Balliceaux, the narrative in the film first claims that a radical cultural eradication occurred, but that then the survivors carried their culture intact to Honduras. Left like that, the statement makes no sense, and we should expect that a project that lists dozens of contributors in its credits would permit the opportunity for some to review and point out such contradictions that sometimes rendered the film’s narrative a bit too shaky.

In summary, several aspects of Andrea Leland’s Yurumein documentary are particularly noteworthy. One is the emphasis of an acute consciousness by Vincentian Caribs of their “cultural loss” and at the same time a renewed pride in their Carib ancestry. Another is the dimension of transnational resurgence, with Garifuna from Central America (originally from St. Vincent) returning to spearhead a renewal of Carib pride and to share traditions. A third observation we can make is about the degree to which this documentary is a nonacademic production, moreover one that is not mediated or narrated by any academic expert. A fourth notable aspect is the extent to which the project involved in making this documentary was locally constituted.

While the film’s gaps and the level of the narrative are bound to receive mixed reviews from academic audiences, this documentary could be useful for first- or second-year students in the North American university/college setting, and for the general public. With twenty years of immersion in indigenous Caribbean research, my own special interest has me enthusiastic to see just about any serious attempt at a documentary on the region’s indigenous peoples, given the paucity of such materials and my continued inability to complete my own long overdue video productions. One has to recognize the considerable effort that went into the making of this documentary, especially given its broad-based network of local contributors, the abundance of available narratives, the political implications of those narratives, the numerous topics deserving special attention, coverage of key local events, and on top of it all an effort to insert the viewer into some aspects of the daily lives of today’s Vincentian Caribs. With so many “moving pieces,” frustration and even failure are more likely than success. This documentary instead succeeds in encompassing a wide range of contemporary issues and historical processes, in a visually engaging manner, and really without trying to tell viewers what to think. In this last respect, it becomes ideal for the classroom setting because it leaves gaps to be filled in by a lecturer, and the work of interpretation open to discussion in the classroom.

I do not think, however, that this documentary should be viewed alone in the context of a course on the Caribbean or on indigenous peoples (or both), that is, in the absence of any other scholarly materials in this topic area. Having said that, it is at present the best current filmic resource on an indigenous community in the Caribbean, one that has long been virtually invisible in the academic literature and documentaries. Others may have done more, but they are becoming increasingly dated. That this documentary has already received some excellent reviews, including by specialists in Garifuna studies, further underscores its virtues.

Notes

[1]. Joseph O. Palacio, “Caribbean Indigenous Peoples’ Journey toward Self-Discovery,” Cultural Survival Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1989): 49-51.

[2]. Maximilian C. Forte, Ruins of Absence, Presence of Caribs: (Post)Colonial Representations of Aboriginality in Trinidad and Tobago (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005).

[3]. Steven Webster, “Postmodernist Theory and the Sublimation of Maori Culture,” Oceania 63, no. 3 (1993): 222-239.

[4]. Shereline L. Roberts, “The Integration of the Caribs into the Vincentian Society” (BA thesis, University of the West Indies, 1996).

Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=41305

Citation: MAXIMILIAN FORTE. Review of (Director) Andrea E. Leland, Yurumein (Homeland). H-Caribbean, H-Net Reviews. June, 2014.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=41305

Colonialism and the New World Order

Russell Means of the Republic of Lakota explains how what the world knows as U.S. imperialism was first developed against American Indians, and colonialism perfected on American Indian reservations...and it continues.

Ward Churchill: Colonialism is Genocide

The following video was recorded on Wednesday, 15 April, 2009, less than two weeks after Ward Churchill's momentarily successful lawsuit against the University of Colorado on the grounds of wrongful termination for constitutionally protected free speech. A jury decided in his favour, finding that he was terminated for exercising his right to free speech, and for no other legitimate reason. Last month, the judge in the case essentially vacated that decision, refused to reinstate Churchill to the position from which he had been unlawfully fired, and decided against compensation. The case continues, as Churchill appeals the judgment.

In April Ward Churchill traveled to Montreal and delivered an address at Concordia University. The entirety of his presentation, and most of his responses to comments are shown in the video.

Ward Churchill Speaks: On Colonialism as Genocide from Maximilian Forte on Vimeo.

U.S. Marines in Arima, Trinidad

U.S. Marine Sea Stallion flies low over Barataria on Sunday, Oct. 26, 2008

The Mayor of Arima, Adrian Cabralis, and presumably the Deputy Mayor as well (Ricardo Bharath, who is also the head of the Santa Rosa Carib Community) played host to a contingent of U.S. Marines who are in Trinidad for "Operation Continuing Promise" (CP 2008). This mission comes with little in the way of an advance public announcement, most Trinidadians being very surprised to see two U.S. Marine Sea Stallions flying low and scouting areas along the East-West Corridor on Sunday morning. The government of Patrick Manning is aligned with the Bush regime in the U.S., and this "humanitarian exercise" in an island strategically located a mere seven miles from the Venezuelan coast comes as Venezuela prepares to host joint naval exercises with Russia in a matter of days.

Prime Minister Patrick Manning (left) and George W. Bush, June 2007

This exercise represents part of a new thrust on the part of the U.S. military to develop its troops' cultural familiarity with zones of potential military action, so that they are better accustomed to the language, terrain, climate, and broad cultural makeup of the theaters in which they are deployed. This comes as part of the U.S. military's new enchantment with "culture" and the exercise of "soft power," a means of avoiding the costly and messy outcomes of unleashing massive firepower without first enmeshing itself in local networks. Similar efforts are planned as part of the U.S.' new "Africa Command" (AFRICOM), launched this month as well. In addition, the Caribbean region is seeing the reconstitution of the U.S.' Fourth Fleet, a move seen as a threat by a number of governments in the hemisphere, including those of Brazil and Venezuela.

Captain Walt Towns, of the United States Navy and commanding officer of the USS Kearsarge, tries his hand on the steel pan at a welcoming ceremony for the ship and its contingent at the Arima Town Hall, Arima, on Monday, October 27, 2008.

With its obssession with the "global war on terror," and the sheer butchery visited on civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq on the part of American invaders and occupiers, it is disheartening -- to say the least -- to see Arima, and the Carib leader, play host to such forces without a hint of protest, or even simple questioning. It is also disappointing to see those in power turn culture into a playful showcase, forgetting the long role of culture as resistance to colonialism and imperialism. It makes one wonder about the name of the ruling party too -- the People's National Movement: Which people? What "nation" do you serve? What "movement"? And one must wonder why a nation in the middle of a petroleum and natural gas export boom, erecting one new skyscraper after another, suddenly needs a few Marines to come and treat local foot fungus and fill cavities.

Wake up.

For more see:

US ship to provide medical help
NEWSDAY, Tuesday, October 28 2008

US Marines in TT
NEWSDAY, Sunday, October 26 2008

A giant statue of Christopher Columbus has found a new home in PR

For discussion of this piece, please see the Indigenous Caribbean Network

•••••••

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico

A giant statue of Christopher Columbus has found a home after years of sitting in pieces in a park in the Puerto Rican city of Catano.

The city paid US$2.4 million to bring the 310-foot statue to Puerto Rico ten years ago, but then couldn't raise the extra cash needed to erect it.

Now, Catano Mayor Wilson Soto says port management company the Holland Group has agreed to take the disassembled, bronze and steel statue off his hands.

The company plans to install it in the western city of Mayaguez, where it runs the port. The town is set host the Central American and Caribbean Games in July 2010.

600 Ton Statue of Columbus (1998 article)

For discussion of this piece, see the Indigenous Caribbean Network

•••••••

By MIREYA NAVARRO
Published: December 21, 1998

Police Officer Adan Vargas Maldonado tried to picture what a 30-story-tall bronze statue of Christopher Columbus would look like.

''I don't imagine it beautiful, but attractive, yes,'' he said as he kept watch on the mammoth head and other statue parts, strewn about in a park, awaiting assembly. ''It'll be something supernatural for Puerto Rico.''

Such lukewarm views are an improvement over the reaction in almost every American city that has considered but rejected the statue by Zurab K. Tsereteli, the Russian sculptor who gave it to the United States as a gift of friendship in the early 1990's.

In South Florida, cities like Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale passed on erecting the 600-ton monument because of its size and the costs involved, about $25 million for shipping and assembling. In Columbus, Ohio, which debated adding the statue of Columbus at the helm of a ship to its other memorials in honor of the explorer, some nicknamed it ''Chris Kong,'' and American Indians said it glorified someone who represented ''500 years of genocide.''

But where some see a colossal headache, others see a potential moneymaker. The statue is about to settle down in Catano, a city of 36,000 better known for flooding, industrial pollution and playing ugly duckling to San Juan, its neighbor across San Juan Bay, but whose leaders expect soon to blossom as an international tourist attraction.

Plans call for the statue, which would rise here 295 feet above sea level, to become the centerpiece of a waterfront tourism complex, which would also feature a pedestrian mall, restaurants, shops and boutiques, inspired by Epcot Center in Orlando, Fla. Proponents say the complex, a short ferry ride from the cruise ships that anchor at San Juan Harbor, could draw 500,000 visitors a year.

''This is going to put Catano on the map of the world,'' said Sergio Cordero, a Miami consultant who is manager of the statue project here. ''People will recognize it like they recognize the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty.''

Not everyone in Catano thinks it will be money well spent, given the city's municipal problems, but officials are trying to win people over by focusing on the future.

The unlikely but impressive journey from Russia to Catano of the monument titled ''Birth of the New World'' began last February, when Anibal Marrero, the vice president of the Puerto Rico Senate, heard that the statue needed a home. Mr. Marrero, whose district includes Catano, said he thought it fitting that the gift be given to Puerto Rico, an American territory on which, unlike the mainland, Columbus actually set foot during his second voyage in 1493. (Puerto Rico's national anthem includes the lines: ''When to its beaches Columbus arrived, with admiration he cried: 'Oh! Oh! Oh! This is the pretty land I'm looking for.' '')

Senator Marrero, who said the statue honored the man's daring spirit rather than his conquest, said he also envisioned new jobs and an economic bonanza for Catano. The city has one of the most majestic waterfront views on the island and is already the site of a popular tourist attraction, the Bacardi rum plant. But it does have problems, Mr. Marrero said, including an unemployment rate of about 13 percent and a disproportionate number of public housing projects.

After enlisting the support of Catano's Mayor, Edwin Rivera Sierra, who earmarked $3 million to bring the statue's parts to the island, the two officials put a project team together and exchanged visits with Mr. Tsereteli, whose large-scale art is found all over Moscow and in cities like New York.

Mr. Tsereteli had presented scale models of the statue to both President Bush and President Clinton and, last September, to the Organization of American States, on the occasion of its 50th anniversary.

The statue depicts Columbus standing at the historically inaccurate wheel of his ship (maritime historians say ships from Columbus's day steered by a bar directly connected to the rudder), his right arm raised in a greeting. Three sails snap in the wind behind him while the three caravels are positioned on a map of the New World at the base.


The statue arrived here in more than 2,500 pieces, some from St. Petersburg, Russia, and some from the United States, where the 11-ton head had unceremoniously languished for six years in a Fort Lauderdale warehouse after South Florida turned the statue down. By contrast, when the head got here last October, a welcoming delegation from Catano was waiting at the dock.

''I feel like a child receiving a gift from Santa Claus,'' Mayor Rivera Sierra, whose statue-related exploits have been the subject of both ridicule and song, told The San Juan Star as he wiped away tears.

Many of the Mayor's constituents, however, are extremely angry over the statue's cost, which officials plan to cover through a $30 million private bond issue. The officials say Catano would only profit, and any expenses related to the statue would be reimbursed, but residents wonder why a monument is the focus when many of their streets still flood every time it rains and some neighborhoods lack sewage hookups.

''That money should be used for necessities, like more hospital services, more police officers,'' said Rafael Roman, 84, a Catano native who was talking with friends one recent evening in the town plaza. ''That statue is not going to resolve anything sitting there. It's throwing taxpayers' money into the trash can.''

Another Catano resident, Luis Ortiz, 47, said, ''We're just praying Catano doesn't sink.''

But if visits to the park where the statue pieces rest under 24-hour guard are any indication, Catano got itself a hit. Officer Vargas Maldonado said visitors from all over the island had already come looking for ''la cabeza de Colon'' -- the head of Columbus.

One recent afternoon, several parents with children stopped by. ''It's a well-done job,'' said Marco Prieto, 8, who visited with his father and two brothers. ''The Mayor has shown great intelligence.''

''The nose has holes and everything,'' his 12-year-old brother, Giovanni, reported excitedly.

The statue has another enthusiastic ally in Gov. Pedro J. Rossello.

''I just picture an imposing structure at the entrance of San Juan Bay which can be seen by air, sea and land and which will be a landmark in United States territory where Christopher Columbus actually landed,'' the Governor said.

Assembly by the sculptor and a crew of about 50 Russians is expected to start in mid-1999, pending environmental and other permits. Officials say they had to rush the transportation of the statue before all studies were completed because of the fear that political instability in Russia might prevent a move.

Unveiling is scheduled for the anniversary of the first sighting of the New World, Oct. 12, 2000.

''It's a beautiful monument,'' Mayor Rivera Sierra said in an interview on Thursday. ''I have no doubt it's going to be a success.''

"Name that Scientist!"

First posted at Open Anthropology:

Imagine, 2008, and some foreigner travels to Barbados, and right under Barbadian noses he picks up the “world’s smallest snake,” known to native Barbadians since there have been native Barbadians, and he proclaims — without a metal helmet, bible, and cross — that he has discovered the snake, and that he will name it. The man clearly has balls, because he also decided to name the creature after his wife. S. Blair Hedges then says the naming is to establish its “genetic profile.” Apparently now his aim is to drive his wife into a murderous rage.

While some local academics tried to hush up the very negative local reactions to this latest episode of scientific imperialism (it’s no surprise that they would do so, given their dependence on academic networks owned and controlled within the dominant seats of Western power), Barbadians are clearly right to be critical.

What kind of world is it where one people gets to name the world for the rest of the world?

What kind of world is it where words from one particular, dead, European language are granted exclusive dominance in the name of “science”?

The answer: it’s a 2008 world, hardly different from a 1492 world.

So name that scientist!

▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼

The Australian Apology to Aboriginals: News Extracts

Feb. 12, 2008, Associated Press
Australia apologizes to Aborigines
Prime minister acknowledges the mistreatment of the 'Stolen Generations'

CANBERRA, AUSTRALIA — Aborigines organized breakfast barbecues in the Outback, schools held assemblies and giant TV screens went up in state capitals today as Australians watched a live broadcast of their government apologizing for policies that degraded its indigenous people.

In a historic parliamentary vote that supporters said would open a new chapter in race relations, lawmakers unanimously adopted Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's motion on behalf of all Australians.

A day of symbolism
....Aborigines were invited for the first time to give a traditional welcome Tuesday at the official opening of the Parliament session — symbolic recognition that the land on which the capital was built was taken from Aborigines without compensation.

The apology is directed at tens of thousands of Aborigines of the "Stolen Generations," who were forcibly taken from their families as children under now abandoned assimilation policies.

Years of divisive debate
More than 1,000 people gathered at two giants screens outside Parliament House and watched Rudd's speech in silence, many waving Australian and Aboriginal flags. Applause broke out occasionally, but mostly they listened intently....

The apology ended years of divisive debate and a decade of refusals by the previous conservative government that lost November's elections....

Rudd ruled out compensation — a stance that helped secure support for the apology among the many Australians who believe they should not be held responsible for past policies, no matter how flawed.

▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲

Feb. 12, 2008, Associated Press
Australia hails symbolic turning point
Native Aborigines celebrate apology from government

CANBERRA, Australia — Aborigines in white body paint danced and sang traditional songs in Australia's national Parliament today in a historic ceremony many hoped would mark a new era of race relations in the country.

The ceremony was the government's symbolic recognition, for the first time, that the land on which Australia's capital was built was once owned by Aborigines, and was taken away without compensation by European settlers.

[see a video of the ceremony in THE TELEGRAPH of London:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid1137942530/
bclid1155254697/bctid1414240726]

On Wednesday [13 February 2008], Prime Minister Kevin Rudd will offer a formal apology to thousands of Aborigines who were taken from their families as children under now discredited assimilation policies abolished in 1970 — an act that many people view as a vital step toward reconciling black and white Australians....

With faces and bodies white and a digeridoo — an ancient wind instrument — blowing a deep drone in the background, Aborigines of the Ngunnawal tribe called on their ancestor spirits to welcome newcomers to Parliament in a ceremony held in a hall of the national legislature.

Rudd accepted the gift of a traditional "message stick" of welcome from Ngannawal elder Matilda House.

"A welcome to country acknowledges our people and pays respect to our ancestors, the spirits who created the lands," said House, who crossed the hall's marble floor barefoot and draped in a kangaroo pelt cloak to give her speech. "This allows safe passage to all visitors."

Rudd has invited more than 100 Aboriginal leaders to attend Wednesday's apology speech, and other dignitaries from business leaders to former prime ministers were also due to attend. A giant television screen was being set up outside Parliament House so people who could not fit into the legislature could watch the proceedings.

A big screen was also going up in Sydney so people could watch the national live broadcast of Rudd's speech. Smaller, more private events were planned across the country.

▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲

Feb. 12, 2008
Formal government apologies
By The Associated Press

— Some of the formal apologies issued by governments around the world to oppressed or victimized groups:

► 2008: Australia's Parliament apologizes for past government policies that "inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss" on Aborigines who were taken from their families under now discredited assimilation programs between 1910 and 1970.

► 1998: Canada apologizes to its native peoples for past acts of oppression, including decades of abuse at federally funded boarding schools whose goal was to sever Indian and Inuit youths from their culture and assimilate them in white society.

► 1992: South African President F.W. de Klerk apologizes for apartheid, marking the first time a white leader in the country expressed regret for the system of legalized segregation that allowed 5 million whites to dominate 30 million blacks.

► 1990: The Soviet Union apologizes for the murder of thousands of imprisoned Polish officers shot during World War II and buried in mass graves in the Katyn Forest.

► 1988: The U.S. Congress passes a law apologizing to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II and offering $20,000 payments to survivors.

► 1951: West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer acknowledges the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust and the following year, Germany agrees to pay reparations to Israel. In 1990, the then East German Parliament issues an apology to Israel and all Jews and others who suffered.

▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲

Aborigines Plan to Sue Australia

Friday, February 15, 2008

CANBERRA, Australia(AP)

Representatives for Australian Aborigines confirmed plans Friday to launch the first compensation lawsuits since a landmark government apology earlier this week for past abuses.

The cases, details of which were not released because they had not yet been filed, would be the first since Parliament formally apologized Wednesday to tens of thousands of Aborigines who were taken from their families as children under now discredited assimilation policies.

An activist and a lawyer representing some members of the so-called "Stolen Generations" of Aborigines said Friday as many as 40 compensation claims were being prepared in Victoria state.

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has ruled out setting up a compensation fund for victims of the policies, which lasted from 1910 until the 1970s, and legal experts say the apology does not strengthen chances of compensation being won through the courts.

Several cases have been filed in the past but most have failed. Lawyers say proving the harm inflicted by the policies in a legal sense is extremely difficult.

"The legal landscape is no different to what it was yesterday or will be tomorrow," said Hugh Macken, president of the New South Wales state Law Society, said in response to Wednesday's apology.

Acting Prime Minister Julia Gillard reiterated Friday that the government would not offer compensation to head off court action.

"We have said no to compensation," Gillard told Fairfax Radio Network.

State governments have taken a similar stance, fighting compensation claims that have been lodged in the courts.

Lawyer Jack Rush said he was representing Aborigine Neville Austin, but declined to discuss specifics of the case. Austin also declined to comment.

A newspaper reported Friday that Austin intends to sue the state of Victoria for unspecified damages, alleging he was taken by authorities in 1964 from a hospital where he had been admitted as a 5-month-old baby with a chest infection.

He then lived in foster homes and orphanages until he turned 18, the Herald Sun newspaper reported.

His cousin, Lyn Austin, head of the state advocacy group Stolen Generations Victoria, told Australian Broadcasting Corp. that dozens of lawsuits were pending.

An estimated 100,000 children were forcibly taken from their parents in an effort to make them grow up like white Australians.

Aborigine Bruce Trevorrow was awarded $700,000 in damages and interest this month from the South Australia state government. He was taken from a hospital without his parents' knowledge 50 years ago.

Australia's smallest state, Tasmania, is the only government to establish a compensation fund for Aborigines.

The state government announced last month it had paid 84 forcibly removed children and 22 of their descendants.

There are now about 450,000 Aborigines in Australia's population of 21 million. They are the country's poorest group, with the highest rates of unemployment and illiteracy. Their life expectancy is 17 years shorter than that of other Australians.

▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲

Australian apology to native people sets high bar for Canada: AFN
Thursday, February 14, 2008
CBC News

The national chief of the Assembly of First Nations says the Canadian government should match an apology Australia has made to its aboriginal people....

AFN national chief Phil Fontaine said he hopes the Canadian government will make a similar move.

"It's quite a statement. It's of great significance — monumental. It's a special moment for the country. It's inspirational and sets a very high standard," Fontaine said.

"We hope that Canada's apology that was promised in the recent speech from the throne will be as significant and as full as sincere as the Australian government's apology."

The federal government's last speech from the throne, delivered in October, indicated Prime Minister Stephen Harper would launch a truth and reconciliation commission into Canada's aboriginal schools, and "use this occasion to make a statement of apology to close this sad chapter in our history."....

In 1998, the Canadian government issued a "statement of reconciliation" which recognized and apologized to people who experienced physical and sexual abuse at residential schools. The statement was part of an action plan made in response to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, which called for extensive changes in the relationship between aboriginals, non-aboriginals and governments in Canada.

Fontaine described the 1998 statement as a "statement of regret, rather than a full and sincere apology."

▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲

THE HINDU
Thursday, 14 February, 2008

Britain should also apologise to Australian Aborigines

Melbourne (PTI): Britain should follow its former colony Australia's example by apologising to Aborigines as it bore "heavy historic responsibility" for policies which led to many children being forcefully taken away from their parents, a leading human rights lawyer has said.

According to prominent human rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, Britain should also endorse the apology because English intellectuals had inspired the policy of seizing the children.

Robertson said Britain bore a "heavy historic responsibility" for the stolen generations and needed to apologise, the Herald Sun reported.

He said the policy of removing indigenous children from their families was based on the theories of English eugenics intellectuals, who believed aboriginality to be a degenerate trait and should be bred out.

▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼▲

Text of the Australian Government's Apology to Aboriginals

This is the main text of the motion presented to the Australian Parliament:

"Today we honor the indigenous peoples of this land, the oldest continuing cultures in human history.

"We reflect on their past mistreatment.

"We reflect in particular on the mistreatment of those who were Stolen Generations — this blemished chapter in our nation's history.

"The time has now come for the nation to turn a new page in Australia's history by righting the wrongs of the past and so moving forward with confidence to the future.

"We apologize for the laws and policies of successive Parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.

"We apologize especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.

"For the pain, suffering and hurt of these Stolen Generations, their descendants and for their families left behind, we say sorry.

"To the mothers and the fathers, the brothers and the sisters, for the breaking up of families and communities, we say sorry.

"And for the indignity and degradation thus inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.

"We the Parliament of Australia respectfully request that this apology be received in the spirit in which it is offered as part of the healing of the nation."

▲▼▲▼▲▼▲▼

"NZ anti-terrorism laws branded incoherent after raid fiasco"

::Thanks to Tony Castanha for alerting us to this article::

From the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) at:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/11/18/2094044.htm

The future of New Zealand's controversial terrorism suppression laws is in doubt, after authorities ruled that none of those arrested in last month's raids on Maori communities will face terrorism charges.

Solicitor-General David Collins QC says the "overly complex and incoherent" legislation means the law cannot be used to prosecute in any of the 12 cases he was reviewing following the raids.

Meanwhile, there are calls for the Police Commissioner to resign over heavy-handed tactics meted out to Maori terrorism suspects.

October 15th 2007 will be remembered as the day the 'war on terror' reached Whakatane.

Heavily armed tactical response police wearing balaclavas set up roadblocks in the Bay of Plenty boondocks and searched vehicles and photographed their occupants.

The Tuhoe tribe have since called in Peter Williams QC, who believes they have a good case against police for breaching their civil rights.

"I may say that there has been terrorism, but the terrorism has emanated from the police, not from anybody else," he said.

Mr Collins agrees that the evidence was insufficient to justify this heavy-handed approach. He also says the anti-terrorism laws themselves are deficient and in urgent need of redrafting.

"I have advised the commissioner that I am unable to authorise the prosecutions that have been sought under the Terrorism Suppression Act," he said.

Mr Williams says that is just the start.

"I think the police position is that they have used the Terrorism Act excessively, particularly in opposing bail, and possibly leading the people of New Zealand to think that there was terrorism by these people," he said.

"That has now been belied by the Solicitor-General in a decision that I think is adroit, and I think is objective, and I think a very wise decision.

"What should happen now, as I understand it, is that these people should be released on bail and their particular cases should be dealt with according to law."

Toi Iti, the son of high-profile Maori sovereignty activist, Tame Iti - who is now applying for release on bail - says he is relieved at the dramatic turn of events.

"Because I think just having the association with the word 'terrorism' and all of the connotations that come with that, with the terrorist acts that happen globally around the world, to have that associated with your family and your name has a huge effect," he said.


Innocent people affected

But for police, it's a humiliating backdown from what they claim was an imminent threat to national security. Police Commissioner Howard Broad now concedes that a lot of innocent people got caught up in the dragnet.

"They're clearly hurt, they're clearly distressed," he said.

"The people of Tuhoe particularly feel like that this operation was directed at them.

"I've got some work to do to build bridges there and I acknowledge that.

"But in terms of this being a serious risk, I stand exactly behind what I did, and I expect the people of New Zealand would support me in that."

Maori political leaders like Hone Harawira say that is just not good enough.

"He announced on the first day, 'terrorism', and he has not been able to prove it," he said.

"He employs Kaitakawaenga, Maori police officers who work in places like Ruatoki.

"He had the opportunity 18 months ago to say, 'Guys, I think there's something going on in here. Get in there and find out.' It could have been all over and done with inside two or three weeks."

Instead, Mr Harawira says, the Police Commissioner did not inform the local Maori police officers.

"The boss of that operation, of that unit, the Maori Liaison Officers, wasn't even told until the operation had started," he said.

"[Commissioner Broad] said himself on day one, 'I stake my reputation on it'. He's blown it, he should go.


Slight on Tuhoe community

The Tuhoe tribe now thinks it is time for police to start listening to their own Maori Liaison Officers and apologise for the slight on their community.

Mr Williams says it was effectively branded a terrorist enclave.

"There's a lot of ill-feeling at the present moment, there's a lot of anger, their mana has been affected," he said.

Mana is a supernatural life force of power or authority.

Mr Williams says there has been a series of illegal acts by the police.

"It is time now, in my humble opinion, for a reconciliation, for the police to apologise and for the police to make recompense, so that this can be amended and the mana of the police as well, restored."

But others, like Mr Harawira, suggest the incident has put relations between police and Maoris back 100 years.

"How dare they arrest Tame Iti! What are the charges that he is leading a terrorist organisation? This is bullshit!" he said.
___________

Editor's note: The fact that the "war on terror" is being regularly visited upon those least connected with anything to do with Sept. 11, 2001, and being deployed in countries that were not targeted by Al Qaida, it is not surprising that the national security state is shown to be the normal state of affairs. Immigrants, almost all Muslims, Indigenous Peoples, have been the more immediate targets of this new colonial war, and what their experience should be telling everyone else is quite important: that the Italian political philosopher, Giorgio Agamben, was right when he he argued that states of exception, emergency rule, surveillance, national security, all of these combined consistently shape and constitute rule by states everywhere. The real "terror" we have to be worried about has always been, and continues to be, state terror. Here in Canada the face of state terror is shown immediately and automatically whenever a crowd of indigenous protesters assemble--police forces almost instantaneously appear, as if the mere fact of protest, or an indigenous gathering, were somehow a public safety issue.

On "Native Terrorism": A Reader Responds

::I am thankful for receiving the following message, which was posted in response to another post on this blog ("More Hysteria Over the 'Native Terrorist'")::


Hegemonic Post-Colonial Discourse (Contemporary Colonization)

What is terrorism? What does it mean to act in the name of peace, or to find arms in places where they don't exist? Are they copying hegemonic discourse? All of these questions are valid and apply to violations that many people of the world suffer, above all indigenous people.

In my opinion, when culture is managed irresponsibly, and we see others judged in an irresponsible way, with no evidence, with comments that are racist and which are placed in a context as if they were made by wise elders, claiming things such as "I decide if you are worthy of your culture or not", "you are violent and vengeful", these people are hypocrites, because they say they are working for our people and are offering "recognition to those men and women who iron our clothes, watch over us, wash our cars, and make our handicrafts".

They do not see that this is not the way, not the right path.

We as indigenous are not only those things. We are the ones who, through our ancestors, have kept society together to the present, we are the ones who have diverse ways of expressing ourselves as daily witnesses to the idea that it is possible to live in peace with others and with mother earth, we champion the responsible use of culture, which does away with preconceptions and ideas promoted by ignorance and lack of understanding by others. We are the ones as a people who have given up so much at such a high and unfortunate cost, such as our most valued legacy, the greatness of the past, our faith, our culture, our food. What kind of sin is it to have self-determination? What kind of sin is it to protest? What sin have we committed when we accept the new nationality of peoples living on our soil? What sin have indigenous committed when we recognise each other as human beings? Why do they mistreat us when we state that something does not look right to us?

In other words, people who practice what they criticise, who judge you in the name of democracy, who say they are offering tribute, are just like the colonisers, they keep exchanging gold for trinkets and want us to give away our wealth for shiny mirrors. Amparo Ochoa has a song that expresses this very well:

And we open our homes and call them friends
But if an Indian comes back tired from working in the highlands
We humiliate him and see him as a stranger throughout his land.

You hypocrite acting like a humble person in front of a foreigner
You become arrogant with your own poor brothers
Oh, Malinche's curse, illness of our age,
When will you leave my land….when will you free my people.

I dedicate this to all the indigenous peoples of the world, especially to my Maori brothers and sisters in Aotearoa New Zealand, my Wayuu people and to the Wichi people.

I want to share information about what is happening to our Maori brothers and sisters in Aotearoa. Please read this letter and send it on, for once make the voice heard of THOSE WHO HAVE NO VOICE.

David Hernández Palmar. Indígena Wayuu. Clan IIPUANA
0414 632 1312
0416 370 3539
+ 58 414 632 1312
+ 58 416 370 3539
shiaakua@gmail.com

"Tradition is like a wise elder, as she sits on the road of days, she tells future generations what she has lived." RAMON PAZ IIPUANA 1938

"La tradición es como una anciana que sentada en el camino de los días, cuenta a las generaciones venideras lo que ha vivido". RAMON PAZ IIPUANA 1938

La tradition, c'est comme une vieille dame qui, assise sur le chemin des jours qui passent, raconte aux générations à venir ce qui lui a été donné de
vivre. RAMON PAZ IIPUANA, 1938

___________

The Open Anthropology Project (OAP)

Editor's note:

For those one or two individuals who may have been minimally curious as to how I could let more than a week pass without posting to this blog, I have to announce the following.

I have started a neighbouring blog which has consumed my energies. This is the OPEN ANTHROPOLOGY blog at:
http://openanthropology.wordpress.com/

The blog was partly motivated by two separate yet coincidental events: my teaching a graduate course in anthropology, focusing on the decolonization of anthropological knowledge, theory, and practice, and the now considerable volume of media and blog articles on the participation of anthropologists in counterinsurgency campaigns. My notion of an Open Anthropology is one that is free of the constraints of "discipline," "profession," and institutionalization, one that is open source and open access, collaborative and participatory, and directly engaged in the politics of liberation (by first beginning to understand that anthropology is an insider's knowledge system...the insider in this case being the colonizer).

So what does "Open Anthropology" look like in actual practice? Well, you could say that I am doing it in this very moment of writing, and the reader is doing it in the very same instance of reading this.

__________

Guatemala: a good place to kill

Ivan Briscoe

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Each day brings an average of fifteen fresh corpses, scooped up from roadways and ditches after the work of death-squads and criminals has been done. And each day, or so it seems, the police force loses some more men, as the latest counter-narcotic cleansing shears through its dwindling ranks, and a fresh batch of guns goes underground.

Life without law and order makes for a restless public. The decisive round of voting approaches in the country’s presidential elections on 4 November 2007, and many of the 13 million Guatemalans are darkly unexcited, sullenly vengeful. "What people want is protection", says Estuardo Zapeta, host of the popular radio talk-show Contravía in the capital, Guatemala City. "They no longer want the authorities to bother - they don’t believe in the police. What you hear now is a cry of despair. Out of 100 callers, ninety agree with social cleansing."

Zapeta is indigenous, an anthropologist and a devout Protestant. In almost any other part of modern-day Latin America, he would have become a progressive political leader. But Guatemala is different. Guatemala has death-squads, polo matches, mega-churches and four television channels, all belonging to one foreigner. Only Russia has a higher murder-rate for women, only China exports more children for adoption to the United States. And Zapeta’s favourite subject is that of his listeners: how to survive in a state of nature. Retired army general Otto Pérez Molina stalks the campaign trail in luminous orange t-shirts, his smile frozen, roundly denying any involvement in the country’s genocides of the 1980s while proffering a mano dura (firm hand) against crime. His rival Álvaro Colom, the leader in the first round of voting, promises a rational, moderate government, yet no one can deny that his National Unity of Hope party is penetrated, as all major parties are, by torrents of drug money. For the moment, Pérez Molina narrowly leads in the polls.

On 9 September, in the first round of the poll, these two came out top of a scattered field of fourteen candidates riding diverse parties, cobbled together by friends and financiers, in which representatives of the left - including Nobel peace prize-winner Rigoberta Menchú - scraped together under 6%. Without a doubt, this was the most miserable showing for radical change in the whole of Latin America.

The public mood is fear, but this result is still a great mystery. A democracy with 51% poverty, wracked by the worst inequality in the continent, afflicted by crime and judicial decay, feels compelled to cure its wounds by scratching them harder and harder. Meanwhile, the killings and crimes are still faced with a monumental indifference from state institutions, or incompetence, or, worst of all, are the work of dark forces that watch jealously over Guatemala from some cold-war bunker.

"It’s widely known who the drug traffickers are. The names of politicians, judges, deputies and officials are known. The US embassy has a register of these people. So why aren’t they captured?" asks Edelberto Torres Rivas, the Guatemalan doyen of Latin American sociologists and author of dozens of books. "I have no reply."

Back to the colony
Guatemala, like much of central America in the era of globalisation, is in the thrall of political irrationality. For an outsider, its cultural riches and starved collective wisdom seem an impossible combination - as if a millenarian civilization were constantly imploding, which was indeed the condition of the ancient Mayan empire according to environmental historian Jared Diamond. Yet the place where explanations usually begin is the colony, formed by one of Spain’s most bloodthirsty conquistadors, Pedro de Alvarado, and perpetuated by a tiny elite that robbed land and lived off its Indian serfs with great self-satisfaction.

During the wanderings of his exile, the deposed Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz was often accused by the left, and Che Guevara in particular, of cowardice in face of the United Fruit Company coup that overthrew him in 1954. Arbenz’s defence was that he could not mount any decent riposte to Washington’s intervention when it was his own military and economic elite that willingly took the US bait, uprooting the country’s sole attempt to create an equitable capitalist society.

Imperial power, first Spanish and then north American, has consistently operated on Guatemala, that potential "communist beachhead in our hemisphere" whose spectre President Eisenhower raised. But the extent of its influence has hinged on the cooperation of a domestic elite whose application of colonial rule - from vagrancy laws to genocide - has made it an ideal agent of foreign strategy, powerful enough to repress but too illegitimate to live without help from abroad. This nexus has undoubtedly been the most stable feature of Guatemalan political history. "The greatest fundamental problems of contemporary Guatemala.... are colonial realities," wrote historian Severo Martínez Peláez in 1970.

This was clearly visible by the time the Guatemalan state, the army and the last guerrilla ranks signed the 1996 peace accords. Amongst its many provisions, the treaty had one ambition at its heart: draining the state of its military ethos, and giving it sufficient funds to provide basic social welfare. In a country where the progressive wing of the armed forces in the early 1980s planned only to kill 30% of inhabitants of rebel areas rather than all of them (President Carlos Arana infamously declared in 1971 that "if it is necessary to turn the country into a cemetery in order to pacify it, I will not hesitate to do so"), this marked an extraordinary change.

The decade since then has dispelled hopes of an orderly transition. Every step back from official power by traditional elites has been mirrored by a new presence in the shadows, reinforcing all the old vices: taxes are frozen at just over 10% of GDP, the military keeps its intelligence under wraps, and death- squads once again tour the Indian villages alongside Lake Atitlán, as if trapped in a Reaganite time-warp. The public, meanwhile, has proved strangely supportive of this inertia, failing to turn out for a referendum in 1999 on constitutional reform, and then voting repeatedly for the right. All that remains are the words of the accords, and the hollow promises of rulers.

"Everyone lives in their own world", argues Pedro Trujillo, professor of politics at Francisco Marroquín University, intellectual bastion of the economic elite. "The government favours and protects business, and they’re happy. The leftwing groups live off international aid, generating projects which say this country is a disaster. No one wants to make space for anyone else."

In a time of sharply decreasing US interest, the blockage of reform points to a process more dynamic and obscure than brute colonial practice. If we want to understand the mystery of how nothing of significance has happened in a democracy of the oppressed, ripe for its own Evo Morales, then three key issues unavoidably come to the fore: the panic over insecurity; the entrenchment of the elite; and the singular failure of the mass indigenous movement.

The enigmas of the crime wave
On many evenings, Guatemala’s main news broadcast, Noti7, opens with the snarling faces of tattooed gang members seized by the police with some small bags of drugs. A few instants later, an advertising break reveals a very similarly dressed hip-hop homeboy drinking a desirable beverage, and adored for it by surrounding women.

There is little more schizophrenic that gangland in central America. Borrowed straight from US culture, or rather deported from the suburbs of Los Angeles in the 1990s, the mara gangs are now said by Washington to represent one of the gravest threats to peace in the region. "Homies", as they call themselves, have a different set of concerns. Many would like to retire from the crime game, but the problem is that they can’t: "Five years ago we started a programme that tried to get the gang members into jobs", explains one official in a major international development agency. "But the narco-traffickers came to tell them that they had to sell drugs. The police insisted on a certain amount of robberies, so they could take their share. In one month, nineteen young kids were killed, and that was that."

While the murder tally has soared to around 6,000 a year, no rigorous effort has been made to categorise the deaths, be they criminal, narcotic, political, or the work of a parallel state structure. Common crime and gang violence are assumed to represent the lion’s share, but those who know the poor barrios of Guatemala City are not convinced: "there have been very few killings recently between gang members", observes the aid worker. "Most are now extra-judicial assassinations, and this year has been very violent."

The question of why so many people are being killed is rarely addressed in Guatemala. For a start, each homicide investigator has only seventy-two hours on average to wrap up a murder case; the result is that most are shuffled immediately into files, with only 2% ending in a court sentence. Politically sensitive cases, meanwhile, are subject to layers of pressure and manhandling. "I do the work, I hand the file over", explains one police investigator. "Then the bosses decide amongst themselves."

Yet the suspicion, voiced in numerous quarters and echoed in an outstanding United Nations report by legal professor Philip Alston in February 2007, is that death-squads are prowling freely once again. Alston abstains from branding this official policy, even if Guatemala’s decrepit institutions certainly make it, in his words, a "good place to kill". But the direct participation of police officers points to at least tacit support from authorities: two bodyguards of the police chief were arrested in recent days for picking up five young men playing football in the capital and shooting then dead, all at midday on a Saturday. The obscure roles played by security advisers, retired military officers and off-duty police suggest the policy of "social cleansing" could even have been sanctioned by the highest levels of state.

Evidence here is thin on the ground, which is understandable. Figures such as Víctor Rivera, a former CIA operative in 1980s El Salvador, and now adviser to the interior ministry and proprietor of a twenty-four-hour drop-in centre for wealthy families of kidnapping victims, are shrouded in mystery, even when they deign to give newspaper interviews; he recently affirmed that "the families I advised knew that I wasn’t going to pay." The former police chief Erwin Sperisen, meanwhile, was an intimate colleague of Rivera, and has also been linked to death-squad activity. He resigned in March 2007 in the wake of the gruesome murder of three El Salvadorian politicians, a narco-trafficking turf crime in which Rivera played a thoroughly obscure role, apprehending the culprits before they were taken to jail and liquidated. In his last official gesture, Sperisen declared on an evangelical television station that "we carried out illegal acts, but we did what was right."

The ties between retired military officers and Pérez Molina’s campaign team are likewise murky, and journalists prefer not to pry. Six former chiefs of military intelligence are nevertheless reported to be involved in the retired general’s campaign, and few doubt that they are themselves connected with the cliques of economic power and organised crime formed by veterans of the civil war. It should be noted that around 120 private-security firms operate in the country, almost all belonging to former army officers.

Grand conspiracy theories are not needed to observe a certain primitive logic here. Organised crime and corrupted police institutions appear to have substantial control over the country’s homicide rate and its levels of petty crime. An increase in the murder rate serves the economic interests of private security and racketeers, and is useful in dampening down crimes against the rich, particularly bank heists and kidnappings - the two types of crime that have fallen most sharply in the past four years. Lastly, and most speculatively, the murder rate fuels the political demand for tougher retribution, and an "iron fist."

For the general public, these causal connections are far removed from the visceral sensations of everyday insecurity. In rural areas, lynchings are commonplace solutions. But in urban centres, demands focus on the return of the one institution that has shown itself throughout Guatemalan history to be exceptionally brutal, but also effective and victorious - "the spinal column of the state, in comparison to the infantile and shameless political class", in the words of the country’s top political analyst and former guerrilla fighter, Gustavo Porras.

Since 2006, 3,000 soldiers have been deployed in joint street-patrols with the police. Pérez Molina’s plan is clear: "we need to use the army until we have a police force that is ready, and its use must not be limited to working alongside officers, it must have its own ability to act." His rival Colom’s plan, on the other hand, would see a merit-based professionalisation of the police force.

There are no prizes for guessing which plan strikes the popular chord. "People want a militarised police, a civil police with a military culture", declares Zapeta.

The eternal elite
Occasionally, the visitor to Guatemala can sight a member of a rare species. Sandwiched between bodyguards, darkened behind tinted glass, shuttered in villa ghettos, the economic elite is reclusive as never before. "They send their children to Houston for medical check-ups, they send them to university abroad, they have their bodyguards", explains Juan Alberto Fuentes, a leading economist. "They don’t actually need the state."

It is curious, then, these reclusive oligarchs - experts estimate these may involve around 150 families, clustered into five major holding groups - exert a political and material dominance greater than central America has ever seen before. Every vice-presidential candidate on the tickets of the five main parties in September’s poll was a member of these wealthy clans. Unprecedented amounts of money are sprayed at far too many candidates, while the television tycoon from Mexico, Ángel González, favours the business-friendly with flattering news spots. Naturally, none of the leading hopefuls - not even Menchú - proposed any rise in taxes, or any increase in government spending beyond that made possible by cuts in telephone calls and other minor wastage.

"Saying you’ll raise taxes is political suicide", observes Manfredo Marroquín from the election monitoring group Acción Ciudadana.

An essential reason for the mire of Guatemala is the elite’s fanatical conservatism. In many ways, this sits oddly with the radical transformation of business life since the region’s civil wars ended: interests have shifted from coffee and cotton to banks, assembly plants, transnational expansion and, inevitably, money-laundering. Intra-regional trade quintupled from 1990 to 2004. Pollo Campero, Guatemala’s flagship fast-food giant, has lit the beacon for others to follow. Inside its innumerable drive-in foodcourts, nervy waiters with hi-tech headpieces instantaneously transmit the customer’s chicken predilections; one of the bosses, Dionisio Gutiérrez, has his own television show on Sunday night, in which he propagates the purest form of neo-liberalism.

The anomalies here are again extraordinary. At Guatemala’s stage of development - just over $2,000 per capita - it would surely make excellent economic sense to roll out better health and education, generating hardier workers, busier consumers and peaceful civil coexistence. But the logic simply does not hold. In a fundamental sense, the economic elite has lost interest in Guatemala, and scorns both the state and its military backbone. The opinion of one corporate executive, quoted by the researcher Alexander Segovia in his work on new central American elites, is illuminating: "In my daily timetable, I can only dedicate thirty-five minutes to Guatemala."

Yet this exuberant pan-American expansionism is something of a smokescreen. Elites are richer and more diversified than ever before, yet their inflated status sits uneasily with the inequality, mass democracy and criminal peril that has dropped anchor at home. This homeland may certainly not matter to them or their children, but even so it remains a platform, full of pliable subalterns and dirt-cheap labour. It serves the rich materially, but its ever increasing distance has come to constitute a direct existential threat.

More than anything, it is this complex bind of financial strength and numerical fragility than accounts for an elite which steers political and media life, yet cannot bring itself to entertain any modest change to distribution or development. One disaffected member of the coffee-growing oligarchy summed it up: "This is a system that requires massive repression. The elite simply cannot see a way out of its own domination."

The manifest destiny?
Yet the numerical logic seems irrefutable. Guatemala’s twenty-two long-suffering indigenous peoples, who constitute around 50% of the population - the precise proportion is a matter of great historical controversy - should long ago have seized power. Indeed such is the force of the numbers that, according to the Mayan intellectual and activist Álvaro Pop, many indigenous people content themselves with their "manifest destiny" of eventual power, even as they continue live under the thumb of white, Spanish-speaking sons of Alvarado.

It was Bolivia’s Evo Morales who proved instrumental in Menchú’s candidacy, reportedly commanding her to stand during his visit to the country in late 2006. Yet the eternal obstacles to indigenous empowerment had not receded. The recurrent indigenous political shipwreck, seen first under Arbenz, and repeated in the guerrilla disaster of the 1980s and the fragmentation of the late 1990s, played itself out all over again, with a paltry 3.09% for the Nobel laureate.

A strong indigenous political party would seem the ideal solution to many of Guatemala’s chronic problems, sweeping away the absurd fragmentation of the party system - the average lifetime of a party is 7.6 years - connecting people back to state power, and forcing the elite into acknowledgment of the need to reform. Intellectuals scratch their heads in wonderment at this absence of what should necessarily have occurred, and diverse reasons are provided: inter-ethnic rivalries, a fixation with community life, and an unbridgeable gap between Mayan intellectuals and the popular base.

Most pertinently, the ideological dispersion of the Mayans has blocked mobilisation. In the indigenous highlands of the Quiché, the indelibly corrupt party of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt still holds a strange attraction, based in large part on the networks of local militia patrols recruited to join the military’s murder spree of 1982-83. Ríos Montt killed many, but not everybody; for those he did not kill, there was food and security and presidential sermons on a Sunday night. It is the Stockholm syndrome on a massive scale.

Guatemala’s rulers, having doctored the political threat, have seen fit to induct the Indians into power. The largesse of the outgoing president, Oscar Berger, ensured the incorporation of 300 indigenous officials into government posts. Over 38% of the country’s mayors are now indigenous, although one leading government official dismissively told me that "these mayors are so bad no voter trusts in them." For now, this is where the racial settlement stands: tiny shares of power in a state that doesn’t work.

"There are two fears in this country", argues Pop. "One is that of the whites, and their ancestral fear of us. The other is that of the indigenous community, which has internalised its marginal status and assumes that certain things cannot be done."

A last stand
A Guatemala paralysed into inertia runs the distinct risk of watching the state fold up and collapse, whoever wins the 4 November poll. Far from lifting the country’s fortunes, global integration has only bolstered Guatemala’s economy of short-term, lesser evils, of practical reason in a social and institutional vacuum. Already the profits from drug-running - some 75% of cocaine consumed in the United States is estimated to pass through Guatemala - have turned huge chunks of territory into lawless zones. In turn, the trade aggravates the crime wave, reinforces the elite’s isolation, and corrupts new indigenous leaders; in simple words, it is poison for a sick country.

For the moment, the United States and Europe are giving their commitment to a new United Nations investigative body, the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (Cicig). The task is to find and prosecute the dark powers that people all the state’s institutions. It is, quite possibly, a last-gasp effort, and few would dare speculate as to how it might fare against a revitalised military seizing control of the nation’s police force.

But let there be no doubt: as the world forgets central America, a tragedy is forming, born out of cold-war beachheads and powdering northern noses.

(CC) Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives (by-nc-nd)

URL TRACKBACK : http://www.agoravox.com/tb_receive.php3?id_article=7017