It was really cold last Tuesday night outside the Ward Circle building at American University. My housemate and I shivered in our puffy coats, and tried to re-enact the emperor penguin scenes from Planet Earth while waiting in line to hear Bolivian President Evo Morales address a crowd of students, staff and folks in the DC community. By the time we'd run through our entire Arctic documentary repertoire, the speech was starting and the event staff was walking down the line of hundreds of would-be audience members telling us to check the website tomorrow at 3 pm when the video would be posted (which it wasn't, by the way. Unless you've found it?
Let me know!) After trying to drum up some crowd cheers, we left, empty-eared.
So it was cold, and I was (selfishly) sad. I wanted to see and hear for myself the man who had the wisdom, guts and popular support (his approval rating, based on the last referendum, is more than three times that of President Bush) to tell the U.S. DEA to get out of his country. I wanted to be part of the group of U.S. Americans who welcomed him with applause, and showed him that we're not all [insert imaginative, offensive language] like our erstwhile president and his administration. I wanted to thank him, too, for withdrawing Bolivia's troops from the
School of the Americas (SOA/WHINSEC) and let him know that we're super close to closing this school of torturers, dictators and mass murderers. It occurs to me that the SOA and the DEA are two hands of the same monster, and used to further the same ends: protection of U.S. corporate economic interests, oppression of the majority of the world's population, especially the poor, people of color and increasing women.
Morales time and again has stood up to the biggest political-economic bully there is, and survived. I think this is concerning to said bully, and speaks to its loosening grasp of control and domination. Looser though it may be, just like here at home, one way that control has been gathered and cemented is through the war on drugs. According to Morales, the DEA, prior to his giving them the boot, was involved in all kinds of activities beyond its already specious purview in fighting the war on drugs. He reported agents spying on political affairs, financing criminal groups involved with killing Bolivian government officials, seizing airports in regions of the country where the fascist elite opposition to Morales has been the breeding ground for coup attempts, financing these coup attempts ... it is clearly very dangerous to be an indigenous president with immense popular support countering the U.S. hegemonic interests in Latin America.
It's no surprise that the
Washington Post article about his recent visit blames him for the worsening relations with the U.S. And no great shocker, either, that the vitriolic racism spewed from the small crowd of anti-Morales protestors outside his press conference at the OAS on Wednesday is glossed over, and its
fascist spewers characterized as "activists." But later that day Morales sat down for a brief interview with
Indian Country Today and spoke of what grounds him in his collective struggle for justice. "In indigenous culture, equality is so sacred," he said. "It's a profound difference between our model life in indigenous communities and the model of life put forward by a capitalist society."
A profound difference indeed. And one we're, hopefully, growing ever closer to recognizing and seeing in our every-day work. We want to end the war on drugs. Yes. But why? For lots of different reasons, I'd wager, but equality might just be a point of unity in our politically and spiritually (and in so many other ways) disparate movement. It's good to be reminded that in our pursuit of equality we have allies all 'round the world, and that together, we're much stronger than we may yet know.
Posted by Vera Leone